Razorbacks Athletic Director Jeff Long dismissed Petrino “with cause” on Tuesday. And after a motorcycle accident on April 1st, where it was eventually found that Bobby was trying to cover up what he later called an “inappropriate relationship” with Ms. Dorrell, his passenger on the bike.
Dorrell, who was to be married to another Arkansas employee, Josh Morgan, who works in for the Razorbacks Swimming program, on June 9th, was Petrino’s new, direct employee – now we know they had a sexual relationship that lasted months before that accident and before she started working for him.
As I suspected and said in an earlier blog post, Petrino already had the sexual relationship with Dorrell before he hired her as his “hand-picked” Student Academic Affairs Coordinator on March 28th. And it was at some point prior to her being hired, that Petrino gave Dorrell $20,000 – why, to this date, no one other than the two of them knows.
Lots Of Contact…
Bobby Petrino and Jessica Dorrell exchanged an estimated 4,000 phone calls, texts, and messages between September 12, 2011 and April 5, 2012, including game days, according to the data results from documents obtained via a Freedom Of Information Act Request by The Associated Press.
In all, according to my quick calculations, Bobby Petrino and Jessica Dorrell communicated an average of 22 times a day during that period.
The AP scored 300 pages of data – information that sheds light on just how “significant” the relationship between the pair was, even as Petrino is married with four kids, and presides over a college football team.
If you’re just getting to this story, this video provides some history:
As to the phone records, on some days between the periods listed, the friends shared more than 100 text messages. When Arkansas beat Troy 38-28 on September 17th 2011, Dorrell and Petrino shared 70 text messages. And another 100 were given on the Friday night just before the Arkansas – Alabama game on September 24th, but just seven after the game.
According to the phone records, Dorrell and Petrino kept in touch after the motorcycle crash, where Petrino sustained four broken ribs, a cracked neck vertebra and various scrapes and bruises over his body.
The Associated Press also learned the following:
– Petrino exchanged 91 texts with Dorrell on Sept. 13 and 84 texts with her over five hours on Oct. 28, the day before a game at Vanderbilt.
– On Oct. 17, the two swapped 73 text messages, and on four days in a row in the week before a loss to eventual national champion Alabama, Petrino called Dorrell early — at 5:52 a.m., 6:35 a.m., 5:49 a.m. and 7:55 a.m.
– The day Arkansas beat Troy, the two exchanged 70 texts.
– They exchanged 26 texts the day Arkansas beat Mississippi State and four after the Razorbacks’ loss to LSU on Nov. 25.
– Dorrell sent Petrino a text during Arkansas’ Cotton Bowl win over Kansas State, though the coach didn’t reply until the following day.
Petrino is forced to walk away from a job that saw him turn the Razorbacks into a national power, going 21-5 over the past two years, and with the team reaching BCS National Championship contention for the first time in 2011.
Stay tuned.