Betraying a Friendship to Get a Viral Story
Question Everything
Brian Reed
4.6 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 9 October 2025
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode of Death, Sex, and Money is a recommendation from our contributing editor Jen Kinney.
When blogger AJ Daulerio broke the Brett Favre sexting scandal in 2010, it became one of the biggest stories of his career. But it came at a cost: he had betrayed Jenn Sterger, the woman at the center of the story, who had confided in him as a friend and explicitly asked him not to name her.
The fallout was immediate and lasting. Jenn became the target of relentless online harassment and scrutiny that has followed her for 15 years. AJ went on to face his own reckoning when his aggressive tabloid journalism eventually led to Gawker's bankruptcy, which upended his career.
In this episode of the podcast Death, Sex, and Money, both AJ and Jenn reflect on the toxic incentives of viral journalism, the lasting trauma of unwanted internet fame, and how a stray dog unexpectedly brought them back into contact after nearly a decade of silence.
AJ now writes a newsletter and hosts a podcast about recovery called The Small Bow and writes an addiction advice column for Slate called Ask A.J. You can hear more of Jenn on her podcast, Not Today... with Eddie Pence and Jenn Sterger.
Thanks to “Death, Sex & Money” for sharing this episode with us.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, so I'm here with our contributing editor, Jen Kinney. And Jen, this week, you have an episode of another show that you really enjoyed. You recommended it to me. And now you want to share it with our listeners because you thought our audience specifically would really be into this. You want to tell us a bit about it? |
| 0:16.0 | Yeah. I thought this was such a great episode of Death, Sex, and Money, which is a show hosted by Anna Sale. |
| 0:22.7 | And it's a conversation between a journalist, which I'm putting in air quotes, because he himself questions that in the episode, and a source of his that he burned years ago, someone that he really betrayed by publishing a story that she did not want published. |
| 0:40.1 | And yet years later, they reconnect and they make up and they have this really honest conversation about the cost of him pursuing |
| 0:46.2 | the story the way that they did and how that affected her life. |
| 0:50.8 | The episodes, I think, pretty remarkable. I'm always looking for radio and podcasts like this because the two of them actually are on it together and you get to hear them talk through this experience of betrayal, of hurt, of forgiveness, of things that still bother them. |
| 1:06.3 | And it's really on theme for the show. |
| 1:08.2 | It touches on a lot of stuff that we've dug into here on question everything. |
| 1:11.7 | Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's rare to hear a conversation between journalist and source that's so candid to begin with. |
| 1:16.7 | And then to hear it in this way where there was such a deep betrayal and then a reconciliation, especially unique. |
| 1:23.8 | Awesome. Well, yeah, thanks for saying it to me. I really enjoyed it. And I hope you all do to. Check it out. Here's an episode of death, sex, and money. |
| 1:31.5 | Has there been a person who changed the course of your life, but not in a good way? Someone that left you with enough scar tissue that never encountering each other again would be just fine. That was the case for A.J. Delario and Jen Sturger. |
| 1:47.8 | Jen and A.J. ran in the same circles for a time in the late a.t's. Both worked in sports media. |
| 1:53.5 | And Jen told A.J. about Brett Fav, the very famous, very powerful quarterback, sending her repeated messages and photos and voicemails |
| 2:03.3 | propositioning her. But she asked AJ not to do a story, and at the very least not one that |
| 2:09.4 | named her. AJ did the story anyway, and he paid a source to get access to the messages |
| 2:16.4 | Jen said were from Favre. |
| 2:18.0 | He posted those two, along with Jen's name and picture. |
| 2:22.9 | That changed Jen's life forever, making her and her motives and her looks the target of sports fans' commentary. |
| 2:30.8 | It's been 15 years since that story broke, but she can tell you, a viral internet story has this way of freezing you in a difficult moment in your life. |
| 2:40.6 | And then it does it over and over again with each new search. |
| 2:45.5 | And then years later, a stray puppy needed a home. |
... |
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