ESPN host Shannon Sharpe released a statement Thursday announcing that he will "step aside temporarily" from his role at the network. It came four days after Sharpe was sued by a Nevada woman who said that he raped her twice.
According to the lawsuit, filed in Clark County District Court, the woman met Sharpe when she was 19 at a Los Angeles gym in 2023. The suit said the two began "a rocky consensual relationship" that lasted nearly two years, but Sharpe became increasingly controlling and violent as time went on. Sharpe choked and hit her on multiple occasions, the suit said, and also threatened to kill her for accusing him of infidelity and resisting his sexual advances. The lawsuit claimed that Sharpe raped the woman once in October 2024, and again in January 2025. It asked for $50 million.
Sharpe's immediate response to the lawsuit was to have his lawyer, Lanny Davis, release a statement denying the allegations and calling the lawsuit a shakedown. That statement also named the accuser, and included a selection of explicit text messages allegedly sent by the accuser to Sharpe. The statement said that the accuser had previously approached Sharpe to negotiate a financial settlement and presented Sharpe with "secretly recorded video of a sexual encounter." During a Tuesday conference call with reporters, Davis said that Sharpe previously offered to pay the woman $10 million to settle her claims.
That same day the woman's lawyer, Tony Buzbee, released an audio recording of an apparent phone call between her and Sharpe. On the recording, a voice that sounds like Sharpe can be heard saying he is "going to fucking choke the shit out of you." In response to that, and still on the same day, Sharpe released a video message in which he once again called the woman's lawsuit a shakedown, went out of his way to mention that she has an OnlyFans page, and vowed to sue both her and Buzbee for defamation.
"I believe [Buzbee] is going to release a 30-second clip of a sex tape that tries to make me look guilty, and play into every stereotype you could possibly imagine," Sharpe said. "That video should actually be 10 minutes or so. Hey Tony, instead of releasing your edit, put the whole video out. I don't have it, or I would myself."
On Thursday, after Sharpe said he would step aside from ESPN, Front Office Sports reported that Sharpe was previously accused of choking a female production assistant while he was a host at FS1. According to the report, Sharpe and Fox reached a settlement with the accuser for several hundred thousand dollars. A rep for Sharpe told the publication: "There was no incident of choking involving Shannon on the FS1 set. On one occasion, he and a few colleagues were involved in some light physical interaction in a playful context. Fox Sports later chose to resolve the matter privately."
According to the statement released today, Sharpe still plans to return to ESPN in time for the NFL preseason.
