Brett Favre Denied Building Volleyball Stadium For Daughter

Brett Favre, the retired NFL quarterback who is now a civil defendant in the State of Mississippi’s lawsuit to clawback millions in misspent welfare funds, denied during a sworn deposition with investigators in December that he sought funding to build a volleyball stadium for his daughter’s benefit.

A state welfare official and a nonprofit operator directed millions in Temporary Assistance For Needy Families Millions to build the stadium at the University of Southern Mississippi after repeated overtures from Favre between 2017 and 2019. (Favre has repeatedly denied knowing the money came from TANF funds). His daughter, Breleigh Favre, was a Southern Miss student who was on the women’s indoor volleyball team at the time he began seeking help to build the facility at his alma mater.

“Did I want her to play in there? It would have been nice,” Favre told state attorneys in Hattiesburg, Miss., during the deposition on Dec. 11, 2023. “Is that the reason I built it, or we built it? Absolutely not.” The quote comes from five pages of the deposition transcript that Favre’s attorneys selected to release in public court filings; the rest of the over 300-page deposition transcript remains sealed from public view. Front Office Sports’ A.J. Perez first reported on the available pages Tuesday,

By the time the USM volleyball stadium was completed in 2020, Breleigh Favre had switched from the indoor volleyball team to the university’s new beach volleyball team, as her father pointed out to investigators.

“When Breleigh committed to a university, I knew she was going to play volleyball,” Brett Favre said in the deposition, adding that a USM official had told him the university planned to add beach volleyball at some point, “but it was going to take a few years.”

“I knew that there was a very good chance that my daughter would not play (in the stadium) because I knew she was going to play beach when it was added, and that’s what happened. She never played in there at all,” he told investigators.

Favre Sought Help Paying for Beach Volleyball

Text messages released in court filings in 2022 showed that Brett Favre also sought funding for the $250,000 beach-volleyball facility by late 2017 after Mississippi Department of Human Services Director John Davis had already agreed to $5 million for the stadium.

The beach-volleyball facility was completed by late 2018, with the team announcing its inaugural schedule with Breleigh Favre among its ranks in January 2019.

In June 2019, Brett Favre sent a text message about the remaining costs owed for the stadium and the…