Get Ready To Cry As Jayne Kennedy, Once Crowned the Most Beautiful Black Woman Alive, Breaks Silence 35 Years After Scandal

Jayne Kennedy was not only a trailblazer in the world of sports broadcasting, but a revered figure for even the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Tamron Hall for her groundbreaking achievements on TV. But when a private intimate video of her was stolen and leaked, she spiraled into a deep depression. Now, she’s ready to tell her side of the story; the good, the bad, and the ugly, 35 years later. Get your tissues ready.

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If you didn’t know, Kennedy was one of the first female sports broadcasters and the first Black female host on CBS’s Emmy Award-winning “The NFL Today” from 1978 to 1980. She shattered glass ceilings for generations of women, specifically Black, in sports journalism and became the first woman to work ringside as a color commentator for men’s professional boxing. If that wasn’t enough, the Cleveland-area raised beauty was crowned the first Black Miss Ohio in 1970 and made the Miss USA’s top 10.

But things took a turn for the worse in the 1990s when a private intimate VHS tape of her and then-husband Leon Isaac Kennedy was stolen and leaked. After going recluse for a decade and not “talking to any of my friends for 10 freaking years,” Kennedy is breaking her silence in her new memoir “Plain Jayne.”

The 73-year-old also appeared on the Sept. 19 episode of the “Tamron Hall Show,” where Hall gave the “beacon” her flowers, and asked how the scandal rocked her entire world long before Kim Kardashian and Pamela Anderson’s sex tape leaks.

“I don’t even know because it was 10 years that I hated myself,” the model said. “My daughters saved me, literally they saved me.” Now speaking through tears, Kennedy admitted that she “didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where to hide.”

But it wasn’t until she and her husband Bill Overton “got a call from the Image Award people” to invite them to present an award in 1993. She described how he assumed she’d say no, but she accepted the invite and later had to be “dragged” on stage because she “couldn’t look people in the eye anymore.” Bill “threw away the speech and he got to the microphone and thanked the NAACP for bringing my wife out of the house.”

“And that’s how I started my journey of healing,” she continued, but admitted she “didn’t know how to do it.” That is, until she stumbled upon a small church.

“I went inside, the lights are glowing yellow… after everyone left I went up to the minister who was a total stranger and I said, ‘I need help. I need you to tell me how to forgive,’” Kennedy recalled between tears. “He gave me a handkerchief, and he said, ‘Do you want to talk about this?’ and we scheduled a meeting twice a week for six weeks. [That’s] when I finally realized I had to forgive myself.”

Now, Kennedy, who was also one of the first Black women to become a global corporate spokesperson for Coca-Cola and Revlon, has since revealed that a family member was responsible for stealing and releasing the tape. And in her new memoir, she’s reflecting on that dark time and her groundbreaking career on “her own terms” and how she now “realized that there is no me without everyone else.”