Producer A.J. Perez discusses Brett Favre doc

For those who grew up watching football in the 1990s and into the late 2000s, the mere mention of Brett Favre can bring nostalgia. The former Green Bay Packers quarterback elicits memories of thrilling passes and Super Bowl triumph.

Behind the glory of the NFL, there was a troubling story of misused public funds and lewd messages. Favre’s story is covered in “The Fall of Favre,” an Untold episode on Netflix.

A.J. Perez, an executive producer on “The Fall of Favre” sat down with Carlos Leon-Trejo for a Q&A session. Some answers were edited for brevity.

Making of ‘Fall of Favre’

Our Esquina Everyone heard about the welfare scandal with Brett Favre. How did the idea of the documentary come to be?

Perez: Well, it’s kind of funny. Going back to The Untold, when they first started, this is season five now, it’s a season or two ago when they did the BALCO one. I’m like sitting there texting everybody who was in it. I’m like, “Oh, you look good.” Cause I got a screener. I was previewing. I didn’t tell them what I thought of it or anything. I just like joking with everybody who was in that documentary. I covered this earlier in my career. I did a lot of stories and stories of sports and you know, the Mitchell Report and Capitol Hill, all that.

EverWonder is the production company who did this Untold with me and also Time Studios. They got investment at the same time Front Office Sports did from the same group. And they basically said, “What do you have, A.J.?” “Well, I got, Favre.” I mean, I’ve been covering a lot of Favre. This was back in late 2023 when we didn’t know what was going to happen with him. He was a civil. He’s still a civil defendant.

It’s a civil case, not criminal. We didn’t know if looking at all the texts, a lot of people, a lot of my experts I talked to were like, “He’s gonna be charged. Everybody else has been charged.” I’m like, “Well, you know, that’s the legal process, so who knows?”

Netflix doc

So we got the green light from Netflix and we started making it last year. It  just kind of evolved from there, and a lot of it  started with my reporting and just my knowledge of everybody down in Mississippi for this, since I covered that for a couple years.

And how it really started, to go back to your original question was, we got a tip. 

I got a tip a few years ago. They’re like, “No one’s covering this.”

 “A.J., can you get on this?” From someone in Mississippi, and I’m like, “Um, sure.” I’m looking into it and I realized I had covered part of the scandal back in 2017, 2018 for USA Today.

It was Prevacus. It was a drug company. It was being pitched as, you know, someone gets hit in the head, that they inhale this thing through their nose and it produces inflammation. The science wasn’t really there. The hard part with that, reporting that one was I couldn’t get anybody on the record, anybody from the Boston CTE Center or anything to say, “Yeah, this is, this is BS.” I wanted to talk to Brett Favre because he had just bombed his ESPN interview.

You know how you horse trade sometimes? You don’t like to do it as a journalist, but to get access to someone like Brett Favre, I said, “Oh, I’ll do it.” Then, he talked a little bit about Prevacus, talked about his broadcast aspirations and stuff. I got him to talk about that.

And I think that was the end of it, until like this tip was like, “Oh, wow, Prevacus. I know this. I know, I know some people are behind this.” One of the people who were behind it was the last person indicted, that was Jacob VanLandingham, who is Favre’s business partner. It gave me a little bit of a head start  even though I’m out here in the D.C. area and all this stuff happened down in Mississippi.

We broke a lot of stories at Front Office Sports and it was kind of odd it’s a sports business outlet. The founders Adam and Russ (Adam and Russell), gave me the freedom to go after  a lot of different things that aren’t maybe not sports business related totally.

We turned it into a business story because I reported on Favre losing out on his endorsements and like, like Copper Fit, and then his media deals, like with ESPN in Wisconsin and the 33rd Team, and there were a couple others that he lost. Sirius XM.

So that was a sports business angle, that was part of it, but it was just something when you go back to Jenn Sterger and what she experienced. It was all before the Me Too movement. He hasn’t been held to account much. He has his fans and everything, but, you want to tell the whole story, not just like, “Yeah, he’s a great quarterback.” He’s won a Super Bowl.” He’s adored in many places, including Mississippi and Green Bay and all over Wisconsin, really. So it was kind of like that.

Challenges

Our Esquina: I know you mentioned that you had some sources. Were there any significant challenges or any obstacles that you guys faced while you were reporting this story for the documentary?

Perez: No, I don’t think there was. There’s always hesitation from Favre’s camp to talk. It’s like, he’s not an executive producer in this, doesn’t exactly know what’s going to be in the documentary because of that.

We’re fair. I mean, we’re of course going to be fair not just because he sued Pat McAfee, Shannon Sharpe, and the state auditor Shad White for defamation. That’s not why. We just have to be fair, just because I’m a journalist at heart. Yes, I’m a producer on this, but it’s still, we don’t want to be wrong, especially if it’s something that’s going to be so permanent like a documentary.

Our Esquina: How does this documentary differ from every other media outlet that reported about the whole scandal?

Perez: Well, we go into it, it’s not just about the scandal, it’s about his entire life. We start from childhood to the unexpected death of his father and how that may have changed things for him into how he went back and forth, retirement, un-retirement, stuff like that. It’s over an hour long, so we have some time to go into more than just the Mississippi welfare scandal, which is why we pitched it because I was covering that. We kind of covered a lot of ground with it and it turned out pretty well I think.

It was a long process. It’s just like, as a journalist, the last big story I broke was in January when the Fox Sports lawsuit came out. Skip Bayless and everybody got sued. As a journalist, you have more instant gratification where this is just a cool process because you get to work with some awesome people who I’d never really been down this road before, and a very diverse group of people.

I mean, it was the most diverse group of people that I’ve ever worked with on any project in journalism. It was great because you get different viewpoints. People from all over the country, a lot of them are based in New York, but still, they all have different ways to go about things and it was great. It was a place that I wanted to be more, which is why I kind of basically left F.O.S to pursue it.

Brett Favre story

Our Esquina: Is there anything that you learned that was new?

Perez: Not as far as Brett, really. The entire team did so much research. There were little items I didn’t know about Brett and just kind of going back to his childhood and stuff that were interesting.

When you’re a journalist versus producing documentaries it’s the legal side. You need everybody to sign a release. If you’re shooting somewhere, they have to sign a venue release, and it’s like all these little tiny things you don’t think about. I know that’s boring but just kind of like seeing how, how they do it and how the stuff we watch on Netflix or Paramount Plus or anywhere is like how it’s made in the process.

It’s so different and the ethics you have as journalists, the fact finding you do as a journalist really translates well to the space and hopefully I fit in well and I ended up directing a couple of the shoots myself.

So that was kind of cool. So I go from just covering stuff remotely, mostly outside of the Super Bowl and a couple other events to actually going out and getting people to talk on camera, fans and stuff. It kind of goes back to my roots when I was 16, 17 years old working for my local paper there in Gilroy (Calif.).

Our Esquina: What was the initial reaction once Netflix approached you guys with this project?

Perez: We went to them and it was nerve-wracking because I was like the one talking the most. I don’t like being in front of the camera. I’m talking to these bigwigs at Netflix, and I’m just a reporter at Front Office Sports with no credits and trying to sell them on stuff. Making a documentary is not cheap.

To get them to come on board with you, especially with what EverWonder was new, but they have a lot of great people who’ve been all around the business and done great things at Time Studios and elsewhere. A major part of why I think they greenlit is because they had so much experience, and then they brought on Time Studios. I’m glad they said yes.

Brett Favre legacy

Our Esquina: Do you think it’ll impact Brett’s legacy when it comes to his football career or overall based on this documentary?

A: It might. If people watch it with an open mind, I think they’ll learn some things that they didn’t know about Brett. I think good and bad. There’s going to be things people are going to learn. Will it change a hardcore Green Bay Packers fan or a Southern Miss alum who watched him play or really anybody in Wisconsin and Mississippi? Maybe they’re not going to be changed by it, I think it’s still worth a watch, and I think they’ll learn something. Whether it’s going to change their opinion of Brett or not. That’s going to be up to them I think.

Our Esquina: The overall message that it’s a precautionary tale for today’s athletes. Can you share a little bit more about that? 

Perez: It kind of comes about because I think especially when he was with the Jets there were some things done there. He got fined $50,000 related to the Jenn Sterger investigation because he didn’t cooperate with the NFL investigation. That was an NFL fine. That was it, that was when that whole tech scandal happened. And it just seems amazing that he wasn’t suspended. He was with the Vikings by then. The Deadspin story came out two years after this all happened too.

How it impacted Jenn and how a lot of people just did a lot of things. Definitely derailed her career. She was an up-and-coming media host. She worked as a Jets sideline host, but she was doing other things. She was working on Versus, which was NBC SportsNet. She was working on that when this story hit, and it pretty much ended that show. It seems so unfair that something that she didn’t ask for led to that.

Rebecca Gitlitz, she’s the director. She’s awesome. We entered this whole thing like, “nobody’s all good or all bad, you have to tell all of it, and then we do in the time we have.”

This shouldn’t be said, it shouldn’t need to be said, don’t pursue a fellow coworker like that. I think that’s one thing, and be upfront, you know? If you make a mistake, own it. I think that’s the whole thing.

You’ll think about a lot of the things including the welfare scandal and his attachment to it. His name came out right around when COVID hit in 2020. If he came out right away and said, “I didn’t know the funds came” which is still his view. He said he didn’t know where the money that he got access to came from federal welfare TANF funds.

He didn’t know, and that’s possible, but if he got out in front of it and just not only said that, but immediately paid back the $1.1 million that went to him, which he did eventually, but also the other $7 million that five of it went to the USM volleyball facility and another two to that Prevacus company I was talking about earlier.

You know, if he would’ve just came out and just said, “Yeah, I’m paying it all back,” “even though if didn’t go to me directly,” The other $7 million, it went to Prevacus and USM, he wouldn’t have probably lost anything as far as his media appearances or speaking engagements or his brand endorsements, because he was like one of the most well, Tom Brady’s eclipsed him, but when you look back, after he retired in the decade or so at least 10 years after retirement, he was very productive. You saw him all over the place. He was making a lot of money, and that all went away.

Not everybody has $8 million lying around. I get that. Even a successful player who played not in this era, but or I guess close to this era were these megabucks. But he made a lot of money as an NFL player and he made all these endorsements after he retired. If he’d have gotten in front of it, I think that would’ve mitigated all this and we wouldn’t be sitting here there probably wouldn’t have been a documentary.

There probably wouldn’t be all this media attention on him, but, you know, he didn’t do that because that’s just kind of who he is. He is defiant, and I think in his mind and in a lot of people’s minds he did nothing wrong. He didn’t know where the funds came from. So I think that if that’s stick to your guns, that’s great, but there are consequences when that happens.

’Untold’ series

Our Esquina: How does this documentary kind of fit in the broader landscape of sports documentaries? 

A: Oh, man. That’s a good question. We’re part of The Untold series. This is a great season too, at least the first three episodes. I mean, I think that if I can’t wait to watch, I need to get the screener for the other two. As I think the Shooting Guards, which I covered a little bit of after I got to the D.C. area. I was working at AOL FanHouse at the time, but, yeah. I covered that and then the Liver King one, man. It’s like that guy I mean, I, as a personal trainer, I’m like, “That guy is on everything. That guy is on every single P.E.D, my God, allegedly on everything.”

You see guys like that, I’m like, you know, those and I don’t do shortcuts. Ozempic maybe if people want to go on it. I don’t have any clients on it, but Ozempic? Great! That makes you healthier. Steroids aren’t the worst thing you could ever do. There’s many other drugs you could do that are much worse for you, but they are when you build up your whole following because you have big muscles, because you use them. That’s kind of like as a personal trainer, I can’t get behind that. 

A look at Mississippi

Our Esquina: What do you hope the viewers that watch The Fall of Favre will take from this documentary?

A: I think it’s going to be a look back, because a lot of people were young when he was throwing all those touchdowns, setting those records, and winning the Super Bowl. People were young and maybe even kind of forgot about some of the things along the way, and I think that’s part of it and a lot of people don’t know about the Mississippi thing. It’s a very complicated scandal. As someone who has written dozens of stories about it, it is not an easy thing to cover, and it’s also in a state where not a lot of coverage happens.

This is like why all the national media kind of left. He had his name attached to it and they all went away. Well, I stuck to it and a couple other reporters in Mississippi stuck to it. I have my favorite one, I think the best in the state, Ashton Pittman is in our documentary, Mississippi Free Press. I think, you know, journalism’s gone, you know, it isn’t what it was and Ashton’s publication it’s a website. Mississippi Free Press, it’s a nonprofit I gave to, I gave to before I even started talking to Ashton. You know, just because they do good work and I think places like Mississippi need our attention.

So if our documentary helps a little tiny bit that’s great because I think there’s a lot of corruption, there’s a lot of things going on there, that the Jackson water crisis isn’t a one-off, that there’s things all around that state, not just the poor. It’s not just a black thing or a white thing. It’s like there’s a lot of poor people in that state that do not have a say, and they don’t get the coverage. There’s indoor plumbing for some part of the state that is still not a thing. It’s that depressed basically.