As editor-in-chief, Daulerio took on added responsibilities. While he still wrote occasionally, he also had administrative duties such as hiring and budgeting. He retained control of editorial concepts such as theme weeks. His staff included 10 full-time bloggers, plus 10 freelancers. Daulerio made sure to develop a deep network of contacts in sports. “We have this thing internally we call the Deadspin Gold Club,” he says, which consisted of go-to insider sources who worked for sports teams or covered sports. ^[5] When he or someone on his staff got a tip, they looked to their sources for verification—“just standard newspaper kind of beat and source-gathering kind of stuff.”

At the start of the September 2009 football season, Daulerio contacted Jenn Sterger, an in-house sideline reporter for the Jets football team. He hired her to write a Jets season preview for Deadspin . The following February, just before the Super Bowl NFL championship game, Daulerio emailed Sterger because he was planning a Deadspin swimsuit issue that would feature members of the sports media. Sterger was widely considered very attractive.

In a follow-up phone conversation later in February, Daulerio told her about the website’s annual Super Bowl Bounties, a kind of treasure hunt list of gag photos taken at the event. Sterger planned to attend the Super Bowl. If a reader sent in a photo that met the criteria, Deadspin would pay 65 cents. One item on the list was a cellphone snapshot of an athlete’s penis, an idea prompted by a scandal: the previous month, photos of basketball player Greg Oden’s genitalia had surfaced on the web.

Athletes “sexting” female journalists and staff was not unusual. Numerous female sports journalists had been sent such photos. “It goes from ‘Hi, how you doing?’ to a picture of their ‘junk’ very quickly in a very informal way,” says Daulerio.

During their phone conversation, Sterger told Daulerio that he should see the photos she had received on her cellphone. As Daulerio recalls, she described some of the photos and who had sent them, and added: “You’re never going to believe who was the worst.” Sterger dropped hints: Jets, quarterback, old guy. When he realized it was Favre, Daulerio told her, “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

Initially, Favre sent Sterger text messages, she explained to Daulerio. The athlete then left multiple voicemails on her phone, inviting her to his room, though he never identified himself. Sterger played several of the voicemails for Daulerio. “Send me a text. Love to see you tonight,” one voicemail said. Sterger had never met Favre, but details he left helped her figure out the caller’s identity.

Favre had a squeaky clean image. Among other achievements, he had led the Packers to a 41-7 victory the day after his father died in December 2003; faced the death of his brother-in-law in an accident the following October; dealt with his wife’s breast cancer diagnosis in 2004; and endured the destruction of his family’s Mississippi home during Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Sterger’s story challenged this image. “Jenn, you know, this is kind of a big deal,” Daulerio told her. But Sterger asked him not to tell anyone and said that she didn’t want to be the next Rachel Uchitel (Uchitel was pro golfer Tiger Woods’ mistress, and news about their text messages made headlines in November 2009).

Sterger asserted that nothing came of Favre’s offers and that she ignored his messages. But when the 41-year-old married football legend began sending close-up photos of his genitalia, she began to feel uncomfortable.