Derek Jeter Breaks Silence on Rumor He Used To Give Gift Bags To One Night Stands

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“Yeah, I read the article. Yeah, of course,” Derek Jeter said of the story the New York Post ran in 2011 that alleged Jeter, 48, had been “bedding a bevy of beauties in his Trump World Tower bachelor pad—and then coldly sending them home alone with gift baskets of autographed memorabilia.” A decade later, Derek slammed the rumor in The Captain, a seven-part docuseries premiering July 18 on ESPN, per The Daily Beast. “You know, you see it, and then it’s like, how the f-ck did people come up with this?” he says. “You know, basically, that’s it. And who would believe this sh-t? And you believed it!” ‘

“I remember being at a Starbucks one time,” the New York Yankees icon said, “and there’s some random guy behind me, and he says, ‘Hey, I just want to let you know that I’m giving out gift baskets because you did.’ And I turned around and said, ‘You’re a f-ckin’ idiot!’ and the look on his face… like, did he think I was gonna say, ‘Yeah, good job, man!’ It’s a story that became larger than life. People keep regurgitating this story that never happened. Never happened.”

The 2011 article alleged that Jeter “has girls stay with him at his apartment in New York, and then he gets them a car to take them home the next day. Waiting in his car is a gift basket containing signed Jeter memorabilia, usually a signed baseball.” The New York Post’s piece ran quotes from “a friend of the woman” who supposedly slept with the baseball legend. “This summer, he ended up hooking up with a girl who he had hooked up with once before, but Jeter seemed to have forgotten about the first time and gave her the same identical parting gift, a gift basket with a signed Derek Jeter baseball.”

Emily Smith, the New York gossip writer and the person behind the 2011 NYP piece, says in The Captain that the publication got a call from a woman who “described two occasions when she got the memorabilia” and that she “saw some pictures of it, but we didn’t publish them.” Emily admits that it was “never confirmed whether the woman was just visiting Jeter or slept with him,” per The Daily Beast.

Derek’s love life drew the attention of the press. He was famously linked to stars like Mariah Carey, Jessica Biel, and Minka Kelly. Derek eventually settled down with model Hannah Davis Jeter, and the couple shares three daughters.

“Members of the media—they didn’t go around asking Bernie [Williams] what he and his wife did the night before. They didn’t go out and ask Tino [Martinez] or Paul O’Neill where they went to eat, and how late they were there, and who they were with,” Jeter explains on The Captain. “So, I just didn’t think it was fair to ask me. You know, I think you have to draw the line. I drew the line at a very young age, and I just wasn’t going to let them cross it.”