Aaron Rodgers stopped speaking with his parents in the winter of 2014, when his girlfriend, actress Olivia Munn, was living with him in Green Bay. Ed and Darla Rodgers had visited their middle child before an early-December home game and enjoyed a pleasant conversation with the actress. They left town believing there were no problems among them.
Rodgers then played a dreadful game at Buffalo, posting a career-worst 34.3 quarterback rating in a 21–13 defeat. According to sources, Munn called Ed and Darla that night and blindsided them with an angry rant about their plans to see Aaron again when the Packers played at Tampa Bay before Christmas, a game that Rodgers family members planned to attend as part of a Disney World trip.
The actress made it clear that she did not want her boyfriend’s parents meeting them or attending the game. Ed and Darla explained that they had been attending Aaron’s games since he was a kid and did not need her permission to continue doing so.
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Munn declined comment for this book through a representative. Ed and Darla said they did not make any disparaging remark that might have set off one of the stars of the HBO drama series “The Newsroom.”
“The only thing I said was, ‘You haven’t been on the scene very long. You’re just his girlfriend. We’re his parents,’ ” Ed recalled.
Ed and Darla made the trip to the Tampa Bay game and did not see their son. According to sources, Aaron later sent an email to family members that effectively said, “Don’t attack the woman I love.”
Ed and Darla had been sent to the Island, a cold and lonely place for those excommunicated from Aaron’s life. They would not have another full conversation with their middle child for at least another nine years.
It certainly was not fair to solely blame Munn — or, perhaps, to blame her at all — for personal decisions made by her boyfriend. Rodgers had temporarily removed best friend Jordan Russell from his life before he ever met Munn. He was his own man, and nobody was forcing him to do anything. Rodgers never needed much help in determining when to end a relationship.
“You get on his bad side, you cross him once, you are dead to him,” said someone who knew him for many years in Green Bay. So perhaps too many people close to the quarterback were too quick to finger a convenient fall guy, or fall gal, rather than hold him fully responsible for his own choices.
At the same time, Munn did not help her own cause. The Christmas gifts that Ed and Darla had sent to their son and his girlfriend? Rather than regift them to someone else or offer them up for charity, Munn insulted her boyfriend’s parents by rejecting the presents — she wasn’t interested in accepting any gestures of appreciation from Ed and Darla — and sending them back to the Rodgers home in Chico, Calif. Sources said they coincidentally arrived on Ed’s birthday, making him think initially that he had received a gift from his son.
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Given her devout religious views — Aaron’s mother disapproved of premarital sex and was opposed to her middle child sharing a hotel room with his girlfriend even as an NFL player — Darla did not appreciate how Munn had joked about oral sex in an interview, or how she had publicly talked about her sex life with Aaron just before that fateful loss at Buffalo.
“She was saying all that and it pissed Darla off, really pissed her off,” said someone close to the family.
Over the years, Darla and Ed believed they had reason to get livid again and again. Munn claimed in an interview on Andy Cohen’s SiriusXM radio show that she had actually encouraged her boyfriend to build a bridge back to his parents, and that Aaron had stopped speaking to Ed and Darla and his older brother, Luke, eight months before he started dating the actress.
“It’s a lie,” Ed Rodgers said.
With Ed as a sports chiropractor on staff at Whole Body Fitness, where Aaron trained next door to Ed’s office, and with Luke using his brother’s image to sell sports-themed T-shirts for his apparel company, and with Jordan, a former Vanderbilt star, following in Aaron’s quarterbacking footsteps, Munn had this to say to Cohen about the Rodgers family dynamic:
“I do believe that family and fame and success can be really complicated if their dreams are connected to your success. … Their work has a direct connection to what he does. At the end of the day, there’s a lot of complications. I don’t think either side of the road is clean, but I do think it’s not OK when you try to stand on someone’s shoulders and then throw dirt in their face, which is what I think they did with him.”
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No, Ed and Darla did not want to let those comments stand for this book.
Ed: “She just made stuff up to make herself look good. … She said the family was dysfunctional before she met Aaron, which is bull. We were going to all of his games; we were staying at his house. We had a great relationship. Nothing bad was going on.”
Darla: “I can think about showbiz families that, like the Kardashians, climb all over each other for fame and stuff like that. But that’s not our family. Nobody did that.”
Aaron had been generous with his family for years, starting with his purchase of a new home for his parents before he was making killer NFL money. Ed and Darla had always wanted to live next to their good friends, the Rubys, in Chico, so when a piece of property opened up next to them on Donald Drive, Aaron bought it for his parents as a surprise for $330,000 and built a house for them for more than $1 million.
Aaron provided cars to multiple family members and at times paid for vacations, private jet travel, and hotel bills. He gave his parents annual cash gifts of approximately $15,000 each, up to the federal maximum allowed without a tax imposed. Aaron helped his younger brother, Jordan, land an upgraded apartment for his final year at Vanderbilt and allowed his older brother, Luke, to live with him rent-free.
Did Aaron sense that his generosity was being taken for granted?
“If Aaron feels his family or other people in his life have laid claim to something based on his efforts,” Jordan Russell said, “Aaron will then go out of his way to make sure they earn their own way.”
Munn agreed with that approach. Over time, Ed and Darla told others that they saw the actress as a chief culprit in the family division. Luke did the same.
Rodgers family members and friends were still citing Munn as a primary cause of the fractures years after the actress and the quarterback broke up in 2017.
And yet Aaron never accepted the narrative that Olivia was a divisive force. In fact, Rodgers told me he absolved his ex-girlfriend of blame in the estrangement and said the actress “has nothing to do with all the years before.” He said that his family issues are deep-rooted, though he declined to discuss the specifics of those issues for public consumption.
Given his history of not commenting on his family dynamics, Aaron said he has been distressed over the years by the occasional leak or comment from a family member. He said he wishes he was granted the same respect he had shown his parents and siblings.
“I have questions about why they feel the need to talk about it, because it’s like a game of poker,” Rodgers said. “When you are holding all the cards, you don’t have to bluff. There’s nothing they can say other than make up stories, but look at the facts.”
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Jordan was likely the last immediate family member who had been communicating with Aaron, since he was there with Munn in Phoenix on Jan. 31, 2015, to see his brother win his second league MVP award, more than a month after the quarterback had cut off his parents. Jordan also spent a full day that spring on set with Aaron while he taped “Celebrity Jeopardy!”
Luke was attempting to arrange a sit-down with Aaron for the following day. The quarterback was scheduled to spend that day driving Munn to a filming session in the desert, so he texted Luke word that he was committed to his girlfriend and unavailable to meet. It was believed to be the last communication between the two for years.
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In 2016, after he walked away from the Canadian Football League’s BC Lions to pursue a TV career, Jordan appeared on the ABC dating-game series “The Bachelorette.” On his way to winning over a Dallas real estate developer named JoJo Fletcher, Jordan told her and nearly seven million American viewers that his famous brother would not be joining them for their hometown date with his family in Chico on the next episode.
“I have a great relationship with my brother Luke,” he said. “Me and Aaron don’t really have that much of a relationship. It’s just kind of the way he’s chosen to do life, and I chose to stay close to my family and my parents and my brother and, yeah, it’s not ideal. And I love him.”
Their hometown date the following week featured Jordan and Fletcher, Ed and Darla, and Luke and his girlfriend. During the show, the dinner table was set for a party of eight, with only six people seated. The two empty chairs at one end of the table, opposite Jordan and Fletcher, were not meant to suggest that the neighbors would be arriving late. They served as reminders that the famous quarterback and actress had cut themselves out of the script.
Aaron was irritated by his family’s decision to film that scene, empty chairs and all, especially when he was not invited to participate. Not that he would have shown up. Aaron did not appreciate that Jordan was using their personal issues to increase his visibility for a potential TV career.
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In the summer of 2016, Aaron’s longtime friend and former junior college coach, Craig Rigsbee, was attending the celebrity golf tournament at Lake Tahoe, the American Century Championship, when Aaron was introduced on the first tee.
This was just days after those back-to-back “Bachelorette” episodes aired. “And someone goes, ‘Hey, are you Jordan Rodgers’s brother?’ ” Rigsbee recalled. “F–king [Aaron] looked over there and he was legitimately pissed off and shook his head.”
When it came to the star quarterback, Rigsbee said, people did not know when enough was enough. The old juco coach was not naming names, but he was no fan of those he perceived to be barnacles attached to the Rodgers cruise liner.
“They just can’t be hanging on your coattails their whole lives,” he said. “People try to take advantage of you and pretty soon they do other s–t, and then you get pissed off, and it’s a tough thing. Then they talk bad about you like, ‘Oh, he’s stuck up,’ or, ‘Oh, he abandoned me.’ No, he’s f–kin’ tired of taking care of your ass.”
But Rigsbee did not believe it appropriate to inject himself into the drama. “The only thing I ever did is, I kind of got on [Aaron’s] brothers’ asses when they were down-talking him one time when they were in town,” Rigsbee recalled. “I said, ‘That’s enough of that s–t. Do not say that s–t in public, and don’t talk about it now.’”
But in the end, Aaron had taken himself out of his family’s life with his extended radio silence, and with his series of no-shows at significant events. He did not attend services for his grandfather Chuck Pittman despite the fact, Barbara Pittman said, that her grandson “wrote many times over the years that he wanted to be the man Grandpa was.”
One family member who attended the graveside service was hoping against hope to spot Aaron sitting under a distant tree. Pittman did say that her grandson called her after Chuck’s death “to tell me how sorry he was and how much he loved him and me. [He] also sent an email. It really touched me.”
Aaron’s decision to divorce his family impacted more than his parents, brothers and grandparents. He cut off communication with other relatives who had been part of his life, including Darla’s two sisters, Valerie and Cheryl, who were around their nephew a lot when he was growing up.
Cheryl, who went by Auntie Myrl, had her theories as to why it all fell apart the way it did, why Aaron, in her words, “just disappeared” from all of their lives.
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“I think that what happened with Aaron,” she said, “being raised so Christian … was he got to Cal and met kids from different countries and cultures, and they worshipped their own god their own way, and he realized they were good people.
“… And he started to make his own choices.”
Slowly but surely, Aaron did pull away from the strict religious dogma at the center of his upbringing and, eventually, from the people who still embraced it.
And then he met Olivia Munn.
“I think Aaron took Olivia’s side with whatever happened on a phone call or with Christmas presents,” said one person close to the family. “They were a couple and he stood by her. … Aaron found a comrade [in Munn] who said, ‘I see it the same way you see it.’ ”
Aaron did not cut off communication with all family members. He maintained a relationship with his uncle Chuck, the youngest of the four Pittman children, who was not communicating with his sisters. Aaron also stayed in contact with Uncle Chuck’s two children.
But one of Chuck’s sisters, Aunt Valerie, had been on the radio-silence side of it long enough to understand what her nephew’s choices had done to the people who loved him most.
“All of my fond memories of Aaron predate at least 2014, when fame and fortune, for lack of a more plausible reason, must have had a major impact on him,” Valerie wrote to me. “I understand that it is an inherent danger but thought my nephew, who had grown into a man exhibiting both exceptionally strong moral character and leadership, and had deep family values, would be able to remain steady and rise above the fray. He began to show disappointing signs of no longer being the same Aaron (which I do not want to elaborate on).
“It goes without saying that his ‘lack of communication,’ with no rational explanation or effort to overcome any misunderstandings, has caused untold pain and grief. … How devastating to have a son and brother shut you out of his life, seemingly so suddenly, with no apparent reason.
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“To my knowledge, he has made no effort to work things out. … I struggle to find a cause, or excuse, for turning your back on a loving family that always supported you, sacrificed for you, and helped you achieve your biggest dream. Surely the huge loss cannot be worth it in the long run.
“Both my mom and sister Darla seem to have always held onto hope and continued to pray for an eventual reconciliation, believing in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, ever ready to forgive.”
Ed and Darla Rodgers wanted a couple of things made clear in this book, about where they stood on their middle son. For one, they wanted it understood that they were perfectly willing to resume a relationship with Aaron without any resolution of the issues that had divided them.
“Yes, we’re all about forgiving and forgetting,” Darla told me. “We would be so happy to move on. …. The new relationship needs to start, and it just feels weird that we can’t communicate even big-life things with him.”
Ed added: “And we have unconditional love for him. No matter what happened, we would just like the relationship.”
Ed Rodgers had not seen or spoken with his son in nearly nine years when they shared a brief but emotional embrace last summer on a Lake Tahoe golf course, before Aaron’s first training camp with the Jets. Father and son expressed their love while hugging in the middle of a celebrity tournament round before Aaron quickly resumed playing. The moment left Ed holding out more hope than ever that a reconciliation would happen.
“It’s definitely possible,” Aaron agreed.
He said he wanted to have a relationship with his father. Could that be the start of a new day for the Jets quarterback and the family he sent away?
Edited and adapted from the book “OUT OF THE DARKNESS: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers” by Ian O’Connor. Copyright © 2024 by Ian O’Connor. From Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
