Dallas Cowboys’ Season-Opening Press Conference Delayed as Owner Jerry Jones Testifies in Paternity Counter Lawsuit
The Dallas Cowboys’ first press conference of training camp was put on hold due to team owner and general manager Jerry Jones being summoned to testify in a legal battle with a 27-year-old woman, Alexandra Davis, who claims to be his biological child.
Davis filed a paternity lawsuit against Jones in 2022, which he countered with a lawsuit of his own, alleging that her filing breached a contract signed by her mother in 1998. Although Davis’ lawsuit and subsequent defamation lawsuit have been dropped, her attorneys are considering an appeal.
Jones has denied fathering Davis. The Cowboys are returning to Oxnard, California, for training camp, marking the 18th consecutive year they’ve prepared for the season along the Pacific.
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones testified at a Texarkana court room on Monday
Alexandra Davis, 26, first sued Jones in 2022 to be recognized as his biological daughter
In February, Jones was ordered to take a paternity test, but the results have not been revealed.
Davis’ attorney, Kris Hayes, called the ruling a ‘huge victory’, adding, ‘Alex is in a position where she really no longer has to hide her truth or live under the thumb of fear and maybe she’s going to finally get some peace and we hope other families will have that same benefit from the judge following the law.’
She alleges that she was conceived as the result of a relationship between Jones and her mother, Cynthia Davis, in the mid-1990s.
Court documents say that Jones and Cynthia Davis reached a settlement in which he agreed to support them financially as long as they didn’t publicly identify him as Alexandra’s father.
The suit filed by Alexandra on March 3, 2022, sought to have a court declare that she wasn’t bound by that agreement. Later, she dropped that suit – instead pursuing a way to legally prove that Jones is her father through testing.
A ruling by another judge previously compelled Jones to be subject to a genetic test, but Jones’ lawyers appealed. The ruling on February 19 is the result of that appeal.
During that hearing, three attorneys representing the Cowboys owner argued that a man who was married to Cynthia when Alexandra was born was her presumed father.
Davis’ attorneys said that wasn’t true, producing court documents from Arkansas stating in ‘plain and apparent words’ that the man who was married to Cynthia at the time wasn’t her father. Cynthia and that man have since separated.
Hayes argued that because Alexandra Davis doesn’t have a presumed father, Jones must either admit paternity or agree to a test.
