DALLAS — The defamation lawsuit filed against Cowboys owner Jerry Jones by a woman who claims he is her father has been dismissed by a federal judge, according to court documents.
U.S. District Court Judge Robert W. Schroeder III, who presides over a Texarkana court in the Eastern District of Texas, dismissed the suit in an order filed Tuesday.
Schroeder sided with Jones' attorneys, who had filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed by Alexandra Davis.
Davis alleged that Jones and his lawyer, Donald Jack, and Jim Wilkinson, a Cowboys spokesman, made defamatory statements against her after she claimed Jones is her father.
Davis alleged that Jones, Jack and Wilkinson tried to "propagate [an] extortion narrative" about her in the paternity case and compared her to "other supposed bad actors who were alleged to have been wrongfully seeking money from Defendant Jones."
The lawsuit centered on statements made in court filings, an affidavit from Jack recounting a meeting he had with Davis and articles about the paternity case in ESPN.
A key element of the accusations was the Jack affidavit, in which he said Davis in 2017, shortly before trust payments from Jones were set to expire, had asked Jones to pay her $20 million, according to the court documents.
Davis' lawsuit called the statement in the Jack affidavit defamatory, alleging she never asked Jones for money. But the judge cited a letter that Davis "admits she read to Jack" at the 2017 meeting that said she had "a figure in mind and if I get that I will be out of [Jones's] life" and that she knew "another illegitimate child in the Jones family had received $20 million," the court documents said.
Schroeder, the judge, wrote in his filing that "a reasonable person would read [Davis'] letter - where she stated she had a 'figure in mind' that, if she received it, she would 'be out of [Jones's] life' - as a request for money."
Schroeder ultimately concluded that the statements Davis was suing over were either true or didn't amount to defamation.
As ESPN, which initially reported the dismissal Tuesday, reported, Schroeder also ruled that Davis is a "limited public figure" who did make a valid claim of actual malice to satisfy a defamation case.
Andrew Bergman, Davis' lawyer, told ESPN in a statement, "We are amending our pleading and we are pleased that the case is moving forward."
Davis filed the initial paternity lawsuit in March of 2022, claiming Jones was her father and that the Cowboys owner had been paying her and her mother at least hundreds of thousands of dollars to conceal that secret, according to court documents.
The defamation lawsuit, filed this March in the Texarkana federal court, claimed that in the weeks following the March 2022 lawsuit, Jones and his representatives embarked on a public campaign attacking her character, "based knowingly on false statements and accusations."
"Not once did Defendant Jones or any of his agents ever deny that Plaintiff was Defendant Jones' daughter," Davis' Dallas lawyers, Jay K. Gray and Bergman, wrote in the 22-page defamation complaint. "Instead, Defendant Jones chose the avenue of calling his own daughter an 'extortionist' merely to make his own public image less despicable by attempting to discredit Plaintiff's reputation and character in the public eye."
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