DENVER | An Al Jazeera reporter defended Monday the network’s explosive report linking Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning to illegal doping even though the source has since recanted.
Deborah Davies, the Al Jazeera reporter behind the investigation, said she believed Charlie Sly when he made the allegations during hidden-camera interviews, citing his “demeanor” during those discussions and not his Saturday disavowal.
“I mean, what we did was we spent six days recording Charlie Sly hour upon hour. There’s more than 20 hours of recordings,” Ms. Davies told MSNBC Live. “On some days there were two or three meetings between him and our undercover athlete, Liam Collins. Look at his demeanor in those conversations. He’s giving fact upon fact upon fact. Every time we had a conversation, we went back, we analyzed it, we primed Liam with more questions to ask in the next conversation.”
Mr. Sly, a former pharmacy intern, posted a video on YouTube recanting the allegations, saying that he had been “trying to pull one over on Collins to see if he had any idea of what he was talking about.”
Mr. Manning has denounced the report, calling it “complete garbage” and “totally made up.” Asked Sunday on NBC’s Football Night in America if he would sue, Mr. Manning said, “Yeah, I probably will. I’m that angry.”
The Al Jazeera report on sports doping, entitled “The Dark Side,” shows Mr. Sly alleging that the quarterback had human growth hormone [HGH] shipped to him using his wife Ashley Manning’s name in 2011.
Asked why Mr. Sly would recant, Ms. Davies said, “Look at his demeanor in that 54 seconds where he’s recanting,” referring to the YouTube video.
“When you secretly film someone, you have to have a very strong justification for doing it,” she said. “It is that you don’t believe the person will be honest with you if you went to them and said give us an interview. You have to have some evidence that they have something to hide. We have that evidence. We have the justification. We filmed him over six days.”
Referring to Mr. Manning, she said, “He’s not answering the allegation that’s in the program. The allegation in the program is that the Guyer Institute sent growth hormone to Ashley Manning in Florida. That’s what we need an answer on.”
The Guyer Institute’s Dale Guyer issued a statement to USA Today saying that, “I have no reason to believe these allegations are based in fact or have any truth.”
“In fact, I can say with absolute certainty they are not. I find it extremely disturbing that the source of Al Jazeera’s story, a former unpaid intern named Charles Sly, would violate the privacy of Mrs. Manning’s medical records and be so callous and destructive as to purposely fabricate and spread stories that are simply not true,” Dr. Guyer said.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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