HACKENSACK, N.J. — Jury selection is scheduled to begin on Monday in a New Jersey memorabilia dealer’s lawsuit that accuses New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning of conspiring with the team’s equipment staff to sell bogus “game-used” helmets to unsuspecting collectors as part of a long-running scam.<\/p>\n
Barring a last-minute settlement, the two-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback could take the witness stand to defend himself against the explosive allegations as early as next week.<\/p>\n
Manning and the team have denied the claims, and have characterized lead plaintiff Eric Inselberg as a scam artist who sold fake memorabilia himself over a span of several years. Manning’s attorneys also have described Inselberg’s lawsuit as “inflammatory and baseless,” and have accused Inselberg’s attorneys of using underhanded tactics to whip up a media frenzy against their client.<\/p>\n
Inselberg filed the lawsuit in 2014. It says that two helmets purchased by Inselberg and two other plaintiffs — including one purportedly used by Manning during the Giants’ 2007-2008 Super Bowl season — were bogus. Inselberg says photographic experts using a technique called “photomatching” could not find evidence that the helmets were ever used in games.<\/p>\n
The Giants and Manning contend photomatching is unreliable because it does not take into account that helmets are routinely reconditioned during or after a season, the evidence of which might be found on the inside of the helmet and not the outside.<\/p>\n
The stakes were raised in the lawsuit in April 2017 when Inselberg’s attorneys filed court documents that contained emails between Manning and equipment manager Joseph Skiba, who also is a defendant in the lawsuit. In one email, Manning asks Skiba to get “2 helmets that can pass as game used.”<\/p>\n
The email does not refer to the two helmets at issue in the lawsuit, but Inselberg alleges it indicates a pattern of fraud. In a court filing last week, Inselberg’s attorneys wrote they would introduce evidence during the trial that would “show that Manning engaged in a pattern of knowingly providing items to Steiner Sports that he misrepresented as having been game-used when he knew they were not.”<\/p>\n
When the emails went public last year, Manning angrily denied any wrongdoing. In a court filing this month, Manning’s attorney wrote that the email was intended to ask Skiba for two game-used helmets that would “satisfy the requirement of being game-used.”<\/p>\n
“Manning never instructed Joe Skiba to create any fraudulent memorabilia,” attorney Robert Lawrence wrote. “Rather, Manning believed that if he asked Joe Skiba for his helmets, he received his game-used helmets and that the helmets he received from Skiba were his game-used helmets.”<\/p>\n
In the same court filing, Manning’s lawyer accused Inselberg of being “engaged in a decades long memorabilia scheme” in which he obtained, without permission, game-used Giants equipment, including Manning’s, from Skiba and Skiba’s brother, Ed, as well as a local dry cleaner.<\/p>\n
Attorneys for the plaintiffs, the Giants and Manning didn’t return messages seeking comment Sunday night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
HACKENSACK, N.J. — Jury selection is scheduled to begin on Monday in a New Jersey memorabilia dealer’s lawsuit that accuses New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning of conspiring with the team’s equipment staff to sell bogus “game-used” helmets to unsuspecting collectors as part of a long-running scam. Barring a last-minute settlement, the two-time Super Bowl-winning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9261"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9261"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9262,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9261\/revisions\/9262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}