Bo Jackson Awarded $21M After Being Extorted & Stalked By Family

Source: Bettmann / Getty Family can lift you up, but family can also bring you down. That’s the case with former two-sport superstar Bo Jackson, the 1985 Heisman Trophy winner who was one of the commercial superstars of the ’90s before injuries forced him to retire. Jackson, 61, was recently awarded a $21 million civil settlement after his niece and nephew were found to have coordinated a pattern of harassment, extortion and stalking in an attempt to obtain $20 million from the former athlete. He filed the suit last April. Like Deion Sanders, Vincent “Bo” Jackson played both NFL football for the then Oakland Raiders and played in the major leagues for the California Angels, Chicago White Sox and Kansas City Royals. His commercials for a Nike cross-trainer that started in 1989 are considered by Nike co-founder Phil Knight to be the second most important in the history of the brand, after Michael Jordan‘s. “Unfortunately for those attempting to extort $20 million dollars from Jackson and his family, Bo still hits back hard,” Jackson’s lawyers Robert Ingram and David Conley said via a press release. Jackson says the extortion attempts began in April of 2022 when Thomas Lee Anderson and...