Chris "Birdman" Andersen finally received vindication on Wednesday when it was announced that he will not be charged for possession of child pornography after authorities ended a months-long investigation and determined that Andersen was the victim of an elaborate internet scam, according to the New York Daily News.
Andersen had been duped by a Canadian woman named Shelly Lynn Chartier from Easterville, Manitoba in a bizarre scheme. Chartier was using social media to impersonate a woman from California when engaging in conversations with Andersen; then she would pose as Andersen in conversations with the California woman, according to ESPN.
"We were always confident that Chris was innocent but we just couldn't figure out what had happened," Mark Bryant, Andersen's lawyer, told ESPN. "It turned out that it was a Manti Te'o situation. It was Manti Te'o on steroids."
Bryant is referring to a hoax that Manti Te'o, a star linebacker for Notre Dame and Heisman Trophy finalist, fell for last year. In that incident Te'o was tricked into having an online relationship with what he believed was a woman who would eventually die from leukemia when in reality it was a man playing a hoax the entire time.
While Andersen was playing for the Denver Nuggets his house was searched and it became public that he was connected to an investigation involving child pornography. The Nuggets suspended and eventually released the heavily tattooed basketball player, according to ESPN.
The two victims, Andersen and the unnamed woman from California, had met and had sex at his home in Colorado at one point when the woman was 17 (the legal age of consent in Colorado). Investigators were brought after the woman had received threats from Chartier posing as Andersen that Andersen was going to release naked pictures of the woman taken before she was 18, according to the New York Daily News.
Around the same time Andersen received a demand for $5,000 from the woman's family that investigators learned as also sent by Chartier using a hacked account, according to the New York Daily News.
"Somebody's reputation worldwide was smeared; you Googled his name and at the top he was being called a pedophile. The cruelty of public opinion was very difficult," Bryant told ESPN. "It's been exhaustive and humbling to restore his name. But we're not glad; nothing glad came out of this."
