Michele Bundy Evans has shared details about the sexual assault claims against Shannon Sharpe that she referenced in a 2023 lawsuit—claims that Sharpe’s attorney says are fabrications she’s making because she’s “obsessed” with the broadcaster and looking to profit.
Lawyer Mitchell Schuster issued a statement addressing Evans’ story, in which he called her tale “nothing more than old news, fanciful exaggerations, or sometimes blatant misrepresentations of fact.”
In a sit-down conversation with The Sun published on Friday (May 2), Evans said she first met Sharpe in the Denver Broncos locker room in April 2002 while she was a local sports reporter. She claimed they started dating after they met again at a club, adding that he was pursuing her “pretty heavily.”
Evans claimed she dated Sharpe for some time and had an open relationship until things went sour in 2010. She said that Sharpe wanted her to break up with a current boyfriend, which she wasn’t going to do since the football star was seeing other women as well.
“We had an argument about the fact that he had removed one girl from his [Atlanta] house and put another girl in his house and he didn’t tell me,” she told the paper. “He had asked me to break up with my husband at the time. I was dating Shannon and my husband at the same time […] It’s like wait a minute, you want me to be with just you, but you want to move somebody into your house and not even tell me. So that’s what [the argument] stemmed from.”
She then went into details of the alleged sexual assault she mentioned in her lawsuit, which accuses the broadcaster of libel and defamation. Sharpe was labeled as “controlling,” “domineering,” and allegedly manhandled Evans, forcing her to have sex.
“I told him ‘No, because you gave it to somebody else.’ I didn’t only tell him ‘No,’ I told him why, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer,” said Evans. “So he overpowered me, put me to my knees, put his penis in my mouth, and after he got enough of that, he put me on the bed. And you know, this was all a struggle.”
Evans added that the experience was challenging for her and that she didn’t plan on going to the authorities, as she believed law enforcement had issues with corruption. But, she says, Sharpe threatened her to stay quiet and that if she didn’t, he would use everyone he knew to “destroy” her.
“He just was so worried that it would get out, and I wasn’t going to do anything,” she continued. “But when he kept calling me at work, and when he kept very aggressively behaving, and I could see it wasn’t going to go away, and he said he was going to destroy me, and he was going to kill me, and he told me he was watching me and all that.”
Sharpe’s attorney Mitchell Schuster offered a rebuttal to Evans’ claims in a statement.
“Ms. Evans became obsessed with Shannon and decided to manufacture a claim against him,” it reads in part. “When she could not find a lawyer to pursue her outrageous story, she filed a civil complaint on her own that is completely devoid of merit.
“The fact is that Shannon has had no contact with this person for many years and it is our understanding that she is still on probation after serving 3 years in prison for trying to kill her husband so that she could hopefully pursue a relationship with Shannon.”
Evans’ story to the Sun matches what she claimed in a temporary protective order she filed against Sharpe in 2010, in which she alleged that “he forced [Evans] to have sex with him; he repeatedly calls and threatens her life; [Sharpe] places [Evans] under surveillance and calls to say he is watching her.”
Evans sued Sharpe for defamation and libel in 2023, claiming Sharpe referenced their legal disputes in public, which ruined her reputation. To support her claims, Evans highlighted the alleged sexual assault incident in 2010.
