A woman has filed a lawsuit against Jerry Jones, claiming that he is her biological father and alleging that the Cowboys owner paid her mother hundreds of thousands of dollars in 1996 to keep the information confidential.
The suit was filed by 25-year-old Alexandra Davis on March 3. Davis, who lives in Washington, D.C., filed her lawsuit against Jones, now 79, in Dallas County court.
The Dallas Morning News first reported on the lawsuit earlier Wednesday. ESPN also reportedly acquired a copy of the lawsuit.
A Texas judge ordered the case sealed this week after Jones’s lawyer filed a motion. Both parties declined to comment to the The Dallas Morning News.
According to reports from The Dallas Morning News and ESPN, the lawsuit alleges that Davis has been bound to secrecy since the age of 1 by a confidentiality agreement signed by her mother, Cynthia Davis Spencer. Jones denied in settlement documents that he was the biological father of the child but he allegedly paid Spencer $375,000 “in exchange for confidentiality.” The lawsuit also claims that the Cowboys owner had an Arkansas friend and lawyer named Donald Jack set up two trusts for Davis linked to her and her mother to keep his paternity a secret.
Jones agreed to “provide, through indirect means and with his personal identity hidden, ongoing financial support for Cynthia and Plaintiff so long as Cynthia remained silent about the fact that he was Plaintiff’s father,” the lawsuit alleges. “If Cynthia failed to maintain such silence, the support would end at Defendant Jones’ discretion and Cynthia would supposedly be in breach of the deal.”
The lawsuits claims that Jones “pursued” Spencer in 1995, when she was working at the American Airlines ticket counter in Little Rock, Arkansas. At the time, Spencer was estranged from her husband, the lawsuit says. The pair reportedly began a relationship, though it remains unclear how long the relationship lasted.
Davis has asked a court to be legally recognized as Jones’s daughter and to be released from the confidentiality agreement that her mother agreed to when she was a baby, per the lawsuit. Davis “has lived her life fatherless and in secret and in fear that if she should tell anyone who her father was, she and her mother would lose financial support, or worse,” the lawsuit alleges.
“Plaintiff has had to endure the endless public profiles of her father and siblings while forced to remain secret to everyone, including her closest confidants,” the lawsuit says.
Jones and his wife, Gene, have been married since 1963. The couple has three children—Stephen, Jerry Jr., and Charlotte Jones Anderson.
