Wesley Hitt/Getty ImagesWell this isn't anything an NFL team needs to be looking at right before the start of football season.
In a twist from your unfortunate yet startlingly familiar starlet's-phone-gets-hacked-nude-pictures-leak-online plot, photos that purportedly show Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones getting close to two young women who are not his wife of many decades leaked online last week.
According to the Dallas Morning News' SportsDayDFW blog, the low-quality pics—one showing Jones snuggling up to a blonde whose tongue is sticking out and the other featuring him standing while a brunette woman's head is near his crotch—showed up first on a guy's online "manifesto," were posted by sporting-world gossip site Terez Owens and then made their way onto Deadspin.
Then, faster than you can run a ball down field, the pics (and the inevitable jokes that went with them) were all over social media.
The 71-year-old Jones, whose Cowboys are the wealthiest NFL team and second-highest-valued professional sports franchise in the United States, insists, meanwhile, that whatever occurred that night has been misconstrued by those photos.
"Someone has misrepresented photos taken at a restaurant five years ago for their own purposes," he told reporters Sunday during a press conference in Oxnard, Calif., where the team has been training in the off-season. "I'm just not going to comment on it." Asked what was taken out of context, Jones added, "Again, that's all I'll like to get into."
Per Deadspin, Frank Hoover, the author of the manifesto where the pics originally showed up, claimed that they were part of a plot (not his own) to extort Jones.
The billionaire wouldn't confirm that he had been targeted or whether authorities were involved, just saying again, "I really don't have any more comment than what I've made. I said that."
Jones, reportedly flashing a smile, joked that he didn't talk with the media sooner because he was suffering from a "bad cold."
The women in the photos, meanwhile, told TMZ that, although they appear to be posing, they had no idea photos were being taken, they have nothing to do with the leak or any alleged extortion plot, and they've retained an attorney.