JONATHAN MARTIN WAITS in the wings off stage in a half-full theater in Wilmington, Delaware. He’s here to give a TEDx talk, “The Fiat Debt Spiral.” It’s about Bitcoin, and he’s ready to be introduced.
Martin is an accomplished scholar. … An entrepreneur. … He was a professional athlete. … A football player.
He walks into the glare of a spotlight, unable to see his parents’ faces looking back from the third row. There’s a microphone to his right and a video camera directly in front of him. Dressed in a button-down shirt and dark jeans, his outfit suggests business school mixer. But his 6-foot-6 frame suggests offensive lineman.
A few seconds pass. He takes a deep breath and exhales.
In quick, short sentences, he speaks of inflation and the United States’ economic relationship to China, of political polarization and financial freedom. He thinks Bitcoin can level the economic playing field, bridge the gap between the haves and have-nots. He has compared it to the internal combustion engine and the printing press. He sounds like a professor.
He speaks for more than 15 minutes, finishes and leaves to applause.
He doesn’t mention football or the Miami Dolphins or what happened a decade ago.
Shortly after his talk, he heads to a conference room. He exhales again.
“I like to present myself,” he says, “as I am today.”
Martin leans back in his chair.
“All the time I’m recognized as Jonathan Martin from the Miami Dolphins,” he says. “That’s what people know me for.”
His parents are nearby. They flew in from Los Angeles after Martin invited them.
“Football is just something I did,” he says. “It wasn’t who I am.”
On Oct. 28, 2013, the Monday after a Miami loss, Jonathan Martin missed practice. He was in his second season with the Dolphins as an offensive tackle, one of the most important yet anonymous jobs in the NFL. He missed practice again the next day and was listed with an illness on the team’s injury report. On Wednesday of that week, Fox Sports reported that Martin had stormed out of the team cafeteria after slamming a tray of food to the ground. The reasons were unclear. ESPN followed, reporting that Martin was the “subject of some ribbing” in the cafeteria. “O-line made fun of him, and he snapped,” a source told ESPN. The Dolphins’ next game was set for Thursday night, and Martin was listed as doubtful.
At 1 a.m. on that Thursday, a FoxSports.com headline read, “Source: Teammates bullied Martin.” The story reported “persistent bullying and teasing” of Martin dating to his rookie season in 2012. Three days later, on Nov. 3, the Dolphins released three separate statements. The first expressed concern for Martin’s health and well-being, denying reports that the NFL Players Association was investigating players and added: “The notion of bullying is based on speculation and has not been presented to us as a concern from Jonathan or anyone else internally.” The second statement said the Dolphins had received information from Martin’s representatives “about allegations of player misconduct.” Later that night, the Dolphins said they had indefinitely suspended offensive lineman Richie Incognito for “conduct detrimental to the team.”
On Nov. 6 — just seven days after the initial news reports — the NFL announced it had retained Ted Wells, a widely known trial lawyer, to investigate and write a report about what happened in the Dolphins’ locker room. National news outlets suddenly appeared outside Martin’s parents’ home in Los Angeles, training their cameras on the front door.
Wells’ report, released Feb. 14, 2014, found that Incognito and two other Dolphins offensive linemen, Mike Pouncey and John Jerry, engaged in a pattern of harassment of Martin — a case that became known as “Bullygate.” The report also detailed that Martin had checked himself into a hospital after the cafeteria incident, and his mother had flown across the country to be by his side.
Martin never again played for the Dolphins. On March 11, 2014, he was traded to the San Francisco 49ers. Fifteen games later, after a training camp stint with the Carolina Panthers, he retired from the NFL, citing a back injury that could have kept him out of the 2015 season.
Dec. 28 marked 10 years since Martin’s last game. To this day, he does not like to talk about Incognito or “Bullygate.” He wants to be known as more than NFL locker room prey.
A legacy can be a living, breathing document. There’s a hopefulness in that but also a relentlessness; we’re always writing our stories but they’re never finished, and we can’t fully escape the events of our past.
After years of requests, Martin finally agreed to speak with ESPN. In a series of interviews starting in late 2023, he was determined to emphasize what he’s doing now and to communicate that his plans for the future are how he should be judged. His job now might be harder than protecting a quarterback from 300-pound pass rushers.
He edits himself in real time, texting updates and changes to previous comments. He sways from being assertive to being cautious. He describes himself as an alpha and wants to assure you he wasn’t a fully formed person in his 20s. He worries over retaining agency of his story.
“I never believed for a second I was being bullied,” Martin says now.
He wants the world to forget the only thing it remembers about him.
“It’s a story,” he says, “that I’ve been trying to fix for 10 years.”
IT’S DECEMBER 2023, and Martin is 34 years old and holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford and a master’s degree in real estate and finance from Georgetown. In a few weeks, he’ll begin his spring semester at The Wharton School, where he’s majoring in entrepreneurship and innovation, focusing on monetary policy and emerging alternative currencies. Just over a decade after the Dolphins placed him on the non-football injury list, he walks a brick path on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. The stones are inscribed with quotes. Lost time is never found again. Distrust and caution are the parents of security.
He talks about nearby Steinberg Hall-Dietrich Hall. The building originally was named after a single donor but later was renovated and renamed, new parts added over and around the old ones. He stops to sit at a table.
His passion now is Bitcoin. Some people might hear the word Bitcoin and think of Sam Bankman-Fried and 25-year prison sentences, but Martin is undeterred. “There are fraudulent actors in every industry,” he says.
Instead of settling into a post-playing career, he resists being known only as a former football player.
“Life requires intentionality,” he says. “No one is coming to save you.”
ON A YOUTH flag football field in Los Angeles, 11-year-old Jonathan Martin was the new kid on an organized football team for the first time. His shoulders sagged. Every movement was plodding.
His father, Gus Martin, approached from the sideline. Until then, Jonathan’s experience with the game was playing catch with his dad at the bus stop — the breath of father and son billowing in the morning light. This was different. It wasn’t just for fun. Opposing players were trying to get to him. He had to deal with confrontations.
“I took him aside and said, ‘Jonathan, don’t let anyone get inside your head. You get inside their head,'” Gus says. “And he took that to heart, and he began doing that.”
Gus describes how he and his wife, Jane Howard-Martin, arrived with their family in L.A. in January 2001 from Pittsburgh, where Jonathan was born. Gus says he’d gone from nearby Rankin, a steel town eight miles up the river, to the Ivy League — one of nine members of his family to go to Harvard — and that Jonathan’s mother had been the first Black woman partner at a major Pittsburgh law firm.
Gus became a professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills; Jane would take a corporate job, where a team of lawyers would report to her. They enrolled Jonathan at The John Thomas Dye School, a private school in Los Angeles’ posh Bel Air neighborhood.
At the urging of his grandmother, Jonathan played the violin. For a school project, he and one of his friends, Tarek Tohme, once researched Daniel Pearl, the American journalist from The Wall Street Journal who was captured and murdered in Pakistan in 2002. “When I met him, I thought, ‘Oh, this kid might go on to become a senator or be a violinist,” Tohme says.
Jonathan went to the exclusive Harvard-Westlake School for middle and high school. “It was this protective bubble,” Tohme says, “… It was an environment that was focused on protecting kids and giving them a safe space to learn and thrive.”
Their schools were popular among the children of celebrities. Halle Berry arrived to watch a flag football game. One classmate had the last name Spielberg; another father’s first name was Denzel. There were no fistfights, no lunchroom dustups, no confrontation. If anything went wrong, administrators and parents worked in tandem to find resolutions.
Jonathan and Tarek were soft-spoken and, at times, awkward. They also stood out in predominantly white schools. Jonathan was the Black son of a family from Pittsburgh. Tarek, the son of an immigrant from Lebanon, felt comfortable at his home and with his family. Gus’ academic expertise was on the Middle East.
Jonathan had been 6-foot since middle school, towering above his classmates in crowded hallways.
“[Jonathan’s] mom even talks about, when Jonathan was a larger-stature kid, wanting to make sure she protected him from himself in a society where people look at a large Black man as a threat in many ways,” Tarek says.
Kids in school sometimes made fun of him, as kids in school do, but Jonathan didn’t push back. It seemed to knock him back on his heels. In texts to his mother later described in the Wells Report, he said he would “just get sad” and feel like “nobody wanted to be his friend.”
When he outgrew it, Jonathan traded in his violin for the viola and, eventually, the viola for football pads. He played tackle football for the first time in eighth grade. His Harvard-Westlake high school coaches told him that he had a future.
As players and coaches filtered onto the field after one high school game, an opposing coach approached Martin, the adrenaline of competition still spiking.
“You’re a motherf—ing beast,” the coach said.
Gus had watched how his son had grown up with football, how he’d begun considering it a path for his life. Jonathan played his last high school game on Nov. 23, 2007. Afterward, Gus waited for him to come out of the locker room. Teammates slowly trickled out. The crowd thinned. There still was no sign of Jonathan. Gus opened the door to the locker room and went inside. As he checked on his son, Jonathan’s eyes were red. He’d been crying.
IN THE DINING room of Gus and Jane’s open-concept home on a quiet street in an upscale neighborhood on the west side of Los Angeles, there are 64 picture frames with photos and documents on the dining room wall. They represent both sides of the family and date back more than 100 years.
There’s a college dean and professor.
The first Black federal judge in Baltimore.
A Civil War veteran and early pioneer in the state of Iowa.
A trainer for Duquesne University’s basketball, football and hockey teams in the 1930s.
Singers.
A deputy secretary of state under former President Bill Clinton.
“His mom has traced it remarkably,” Jonathan’s friend, Tarek, said a day earlier. “And that family has achieved incredible success in the face of persecution, in the face of discrimination.”
Gus Martin points now at a black-and-white photo of his great-grandparents, who arrived in Pittsburgh from Virginia during The Great Migration. His great-grandfather, who Gus says had red hair and could have passed for a white man, used to belly up to bars in Pennsylvania’s working-class Monongahela Valley. When his glass was drained, he’d ask the bartender: “‘You don’t serve n—–s here, do you?'” And they’d say, ‘Nah, of course not.’ He’d take his glass, [and say] ‘You just did.'”
That story stays alive on their wall, not to be erased. There’s a framed document, too. It’s a family member’s emancipation papers. Gus says he doesn’t know to whom the papers belong, but says his wife’s family history traces back to 1619 and the arrival of slaves on North American shores.
“If you read the history books, they say the first Africans arrived, her ancestor was one of them,” Gus says. “Ten-year-old girl named Margarida. She was probably Catholic. She was probably Christian. She was taken from Angola, which was a Portuguese area, put on a Portuguese boat going to Mexico to work in the mines that were there. British pirate ships with letters of marque came and took this ship, thinking they’d find gold on there, because the Spanish Main was taking gold. Found these humans in there. So they took the healthiest ones. They needed food. The only English-speaking colony was Jamestown [Virginia]. They offloaded these people in exchange for food.”
He stares at the wall.
“Heck of a story,” he says.
The house is a collection of Gus and Jane’s life experiences. Historical artifacts and mementos from their travels. Photos of Jonathan and family during their happiest moments. They have a Steelers “Terrible Towel” draped below their television. They kept Jonathan’s helmet from Stanford, but there’s little else from their son’s football career on display.
When Gus and Jane walk to the kitchen to get a snack, to the living room to watch TV, or to the bedroom at night, they walk past the wall.
“There’s this line, ‘Ancestors are meaningful,'” Gus says, “‘family’s everything.'”
COACH DAVID SHAW had messages posted around the football facilities at Stanford, including in the locker room, where a sign read “Wring It Dry.”
Shaw didn’t want his players’ experiences confined to the football buildings. In the dorms, they mixed with successful people — often the children of millionaires, billionaires and celebrities — connections that would be useful after they hung up their pads.
“Take advantage of that environment,” he says, “and not say, ‘I’m just here to play football.'”
Shaw points to former Stanford players like David DeCastro, who majored in management, science and engineering, and Christian McCaffrey, who was Division I college football’s Academic All-America of the Year, or to Andrew Luck, who started a book club in the NFL. Those players’ NFL teammates often looked sideways, with a half a grin, as if to say, Oh, you’re a Stanford guy, what are you reading now?
Martin knew the Stanford environment and fit into it. But when he got to the NFL, the culture was different.
“So many kids will go to a Stanford, Princeton, Harvard and go to the NFL and not have any issues at all with translation,” Shaw says. “I could also see being from those types of environments and going to an NFL locker room where there are not a lot of people majoring in what you’re majoring in or have your same out-of-sports interests. And the different makeup of that locker room is something to get used to.”
Jonathan felt out of place in an NFL locker room and didn’t connect with his teammates.
When “Bullygate” broke, Shaw watched from afar. He thought his former player was being mischaracterized, made out to be someone he was not. Shaw had seen controversy before and believed eventually it would blow over.
“It’s just that this didn’t calm down for a while,” he says.
At one point, he reached out to Martin’s mother. While recruiting, Shaw had hit it off with Martin’s parents. Stanford’s recruiting pitch — high-level football and elite academics — had been what Gus and Jane were pushing for Jonathan all along.
Sometime after the story about Martin and Incognito broke, Shaw heard from his former player. “It was mainly me making sure he knew that I was there for him, that I could support him,” Shaw says. “And him expressing gratitude for that.”
It hurt Shaw to watch what was happening. He knew he couldn’t protect Jonathan or stop what was going on. If it had been an on-field issue, he could coach him up. He gave former players advice about their film sometimes. But “Bullygate” was bigger.
“I was not involved in any of the things going on,” Shaw says. “But I thought it was important for him to know that I cared about him. That we at Stanford cared about him. And that we were gonna be there for him if he needed us.”
Whatever was going on was happening on a different, more public scale than the game. There was no playbook for this.
“You want them to do so well,” Shaw says. “You want them to have such a great transition, so when things don’t go well, it hurts.”
JUST DAYS AFTER a mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, Gus Martin was at home in Los Angeles when he got a text. It was February 2018, just over three years since his son’s last NFL game, and one of Jonathan’s friends told him about a post on Jonathan’s Instagram account. The post showed a photo of a shotgun with ammunition scattered around it. It tagged Richie Incognito’s and former Miami teammate Mike Pouncey’s accounts, as well as the accounts of two former high school classmates, and included hashtags for Harvard-Westlake and the Dolphins.
“When you’re a bully victim & a coward, your options are suicide, or revenge,” the caption on the post read.
His mother was on a business trip at the time. His father headed to Jonathan’s condo, worried and concerned for his son. A SWAT team had arrived but left because Jonathan wasn’t there. Gus stayed until early morning, but Jonathan had checked himself into a Los Angeles area hospital the same day the post appeared. Jonathan eventually left and stayed at his parents’ home.
“And when that happened, gosh, it surprised us,” Gus says. “Surprised everybody. But that’s when we said, I think we had a fairly healthy response in that we said, ‘OK, now we know that he has to receive some sort of medical treatment at that point.”
Gus said it was good that Jonathan went on his own.
“That’s sort of how I think of his personality, that he really didn’t mean what he posted,” Gus says, “but then he realized he had a real problem, so he went to the hospital.”
In August of 2015, right after retiring from the NFL, Jonathan posted to Facebook that he suffered from depression and had tried to kill himself on multiple occasions. “Your self-perceived social inadequacy dominates your every waking moment & thought,” he wrote. “You’re petrified of going to work. You either sleep 12, 14, 16, hours a day when you can, or not at all.” He finished his Stanford degree in Classics with a concentration in Ancient History in January 2016. He had three stops as an intern, in private equity and real estate, over the next two years. Then in 2018, the Instagram post appeared.
Martin was arrested and faced four felony counts in connection with the post. His then-lawyer, Winston McKesson, told the Los Angeles Times that the post was “not a threat … it was a cry for help.” One count against Martin was dismissed in January 2019, and the others were dismissed in 2021 after he completed a two-year diversion program.
Six years after making that lonely drive to his son’s condo, Gus views Jonathan’s trying times as woven into his experience: “Like being a quilt,” he says. “That we are what we are. We’re a tapestry. So, it’s certainly a part of him, but it’s not all of him.”
Martin says he has apologized, privately and publicly, to the people in the Harvard-Westlake community and regrets how his actions in posting to Instagram affected them. Martin says he spent several years lost, confused and abusing alcohol and other substances. He describes the stages of his life like a book’s chapters. One closes and another opens.
“But I will say that it is important for me to say that my actions in 2018 were not what people thought they were,” he says. “I don’t want to get into more detail than that. But when you have sort of a negative situation like I went through at a young age, you’re off-kilter. You’re off balance. And it takes a while to regain your focus.”
IN LATE 2019, Martin moved to Austin, Texas, where he started a real estate company with a college teammate before joining another company — all while working on a master’s degree from Georgetown. He arrived from New Orleans, where he had spent six months in real estate. It was part of a pattern. He kept starting from the bottom, perpetually seeking the opportunity and the safety of a blank page.
“I think you learn more from your failures than you do from your successes,” he says. “And the tabloid media is there to let everyone know about your failures, but they’re not there when you graduate from Georgetown or when you start a company in Austin, Texas.”
He describes one new version of himself now in a story he tells about a Silicon Valley mentor — “this guy was probably worth nine figures” — who drove a 10-year-old Prius with a front bumper sealed with duct tape. “It was part of his identity,” Martin says. “He is blue-collar. And I feel similar, where it’s like I want to be a blue-collar businessman. I don’t want to be someone with soft, manicured palms. I want to be someone with calluses, with splinters in my hands.”
When he arrived in Austin, instead of spending time in an air-conditioned office, Martin says he flipped houses in the heat — “toil, pain, these things are important” — installing vinyl floors, building fences and scraping ceilings even as sciatic pain from a life in football radiated down his leg.
“I don’t have reporters in front of my house asking for comments on, ‘Hey, you’re doing great in life. How’s that?'” he says. “It’s more so they’re showing up when you’re not doing great. So, for me, it’s an unfortunate reality of media, and the internet, and social media, and everything today, where the internet is forever and perception is reality, right?”
TWO SUMMERS AGO, during a break from Wharton, Martin visited a coffee farm in El Salvador. While there, he got an idea. He’d invited a friend with connections to coffee businesses in Los Angeles to make the trip with him and introduced him to the country’s harvest, grown at high altitudes on volcanic soil, making for high-quality flavor. Martin’s friend took samples back to Los Angeles, and sommeliers there were impressed. How would the product be exported to L.A.? What if there were a drought? Could he make a business of it?
Martin remembers standing in a farm field three hours outside of San Salvador, the country’s capital city, and feeling the stare of the locals. “Large Black Americans are kind of rare down there,” he says.
His coffee business never got off the ground, but Martin had also been in El Salvador to learn about Bitcoin. El Salvador was the first country to make Bitcoin — a digital currency decentralized from banks — legal tender, and one of his Wharton professors had encouraged Martin to immerse himself there and see how it worked up close. “I was impressed by his initiative,” professor Francine McKenna says.
She encouraged him to write for CoinDesk, which covers the cryptocurrency world, while there. In an August 2023 article, Martin wrote: “The core ethos of Bitcoin is to create a fairer and more accessible monetary system for the billions of people worldwide who do not have access to traditional banking services.”
Taking up for the underdog became one of Martin’s passions. When he dedicated himself to learning about Bitcoin, he also became obsessed with becoming the best in the world at something other than football.
“It took me 10,000 hours to become a 0.1 percenter in football,” Martin says. “If you’re an NFL starter as an offensive tackle, you’re among the 64 best people in the world at your position. I view this journey as probably being similar.
“It’s probably going to take me 10,000 hours to become a 0.1 percenter in Bitcoin. But it’s a new space, and I enjoy having this feeling of being a frontiersman. It’s like being in California during The Gold Rush.”
As he sipped coffee near a volcano in El Salvador, Martin could see the chance to reinvent himself. Confound expectations and defy perceptions.
“I wanted a slight element of danger,” he says.
JONATHAN MARTIN PARTICIPATED in the 2014 Wells Report. The report found Richie Incognito, John Jerry and Mike Pouncey harassed Martin, another offensive lineman and a member of the training staff. It described “sexually explicit remarks” about members of his family and said that “at times [Martin was] ridiculed with racial insults and other offensive comments.” Five days after the report was published, Dolphins offensive line coach Jim Turner was fired. Incognito, who had been suspended by the team when “Bullygate” broke, did not play in the NFL in 2014.
By phone in March of 2024, Martin reflected on the Wells Report saying, “It’s my greatest regret of my life to this day is participating in that clown show.”
Things happened in that locker room. His teammates called him names and said racist things to his face. They made misogynistic comments. On the spectrum of behavior in football locker rooms it was extreme, he said. But after “Bullygate” broke, Martin became the martyred face of bullying, a role he says he didn’t want to play. He didn’t excuse what Incognito and the others did. It angered him. But he saw himself as a football player who had earned his spot on the team. “I was an NFL starter,” he said. “I was getting paid millions of dollars.” He saw the world of football as intensely competitive, and he saw himself as someone strong enough to be there.
When Martin left the Dolphins’ facility on Oct. 28, 2013, reporters started asking questions. At some point after his departure, Martin said during the call, his mother told a reporter that he was being bullied in Miami, that she “said the word ‘bullying.'”
“I had a situation with my teammates that I wasn’t super happy about,” he said. “But my mother had her own read on the situation.”
The word took on a life of its own. The situation went viral.
“I hadn’t even told my coaches, hadn’t told anyone,” Martin said. “And suddenly it’s on ESPN, right?”
At the time, he didn’t push back.
“I didn’t believe any of the stances I was taking, right, where I’m this victim,” he said. “I wasn’t a victim, right? And, again, it’s been a point of consternation.”
“His mom and I did strongly intervene,” Gus Martin says. “To make sure he was protected.”
Jonathan initially had shared with his parents what he hadn’t shared with anyone else about what happened in the Miami locker room. Jane Howard-Martin declined to speak for this story, but Jonathan’s friend Tarek remembers Martin’s parents always trying “to create a safe space for [him] to not have to encounter the same things that they did.” It isn’t hard to picture them trying to take control during the days of “Bullygate.”
“My mother maybe in her mind — I can’t read her mind — she thought she was doing the right thing,” Jonathan Martin said.
Looking back, Martin said on the call that he understands why his parents would have been overprotective of him.
“She wasn’t intentionally trying to hurt me,” he said.
He said most people, especially those who didn’t play the game, might think what happened to him was bullying. But men who sweat and grunt and bang heads for a living often act a certain way when they are around each other. “She’s never played football,” he said. “She doesn’t know what it’s like to communicate when you’re playing football.”
He did need to step away, he said. The environment and pressures took a toll on him. “There’s certain things I want to acknowledge — one, I was not well,” he said. “I needed some sort of break from football.”
Martin said he doesn’t view not standing up to Incognito and other players as cowardly: “I was young, and I didn’t know how to handle it.” The regret now, he said, is how the investigation proceeded and how he responded to the story going public and the resulting fallout. As a result of that, Martin said he no longer could call himself a good teammate at the time.
“I should have stood up to it more,” he said. “I should have been like, ‘Look, this is wrong.'”
Before hanging up, Martin seemed to replay the moment in his head. He could have told team management his version of the story, he said. He could have put out a statement and made clear to the public what was going on and how he felt about it. He could have countered what his mother had told the reporter.
“It didn’t need to be this tit-for-tat on TMZ, right?” he said. “I should have sat down with the owner and head coach of the Dolphins and figured it out.”
JOE PHILBIN REMAINED Dolphins head coach until October 2015, nearly two years after Martin last played for him. He was fired after a loss to the New York Jets dropped his team to 1-3.
Philbin has spent four decades in college football and the NFL and, most recently, as an assistant coach with the Las Vegas Raiders in 2024. Other than four games as interim head coach of the Green Bay Packers in 2018, his only stint in charge came in Miami.
He speaks of Martin and 2013 in broad terms. Martin worked hard as a member of the Dolphins. He contributed to the success of the team. He is an intelligent guy.
Whatever conversations he had with Martin during the incident, he won’t speak to. “I consider those kind of sacred in the coaching profession with a player,” he says. “So I’m going to kind of leave it at that.”
Whatever went on in the Miami locker room, he won’t revisit. “When you’re a coach, you have an obligation to each and every player that you coach, regardless of what level you’re at,” Philbin says. “And you want all your players to have a great experience playing football. Things happened, some things, but I don’t have any feelings about all that stuff.
“That’s way in the past.”
“DO YOU WANT to hear the Richie Incognito voicemail?” Gus Martin asks.
He sits at his office desk at Dominguez in Carson, California. Early afternoon light comes through a window behind him. It’s January 2024, and the semester has just begun.
He is a professor in criminal justice administration and his class on mass shootings and the psychology behind them has just ended.
He keeps the recording in his phone. He places it on the desk and hits play.
It’s Incognito’s voice, April 6, 2013.
“Hey, wassup, you half-n—– piece of s—. I saw you on Twitter, you been training 10 weeks. I’ll s— in your f—ing mouth. I’m going to slap your f—ing mouth, I’m going to slap your real mother across the face [laughter]. F— you, you’re still a rookie. I’ll kill you.”
The voicemail ends. Gus picks up his phone, sits back and sighs. The room is quiet.
The next day, he says the relationship between him and Jane and Jonathan has improved. His son calls, and they talk. He believes Jonathan — on the fast track at Wharton, a burgeoning Bitcoiner and businessman — is in a good place.
So why hold on to the tape?
“Firstly, that this happened,” he says. “If anyone questions it, if anyone says, ‘Oh, it wasn’t all that.’ It happened. And so I think that’s why. In case I have to, oh gosh, remember it myself, which of course I will remember. But in case someone just simply says, ‘No, that was all made up.’ It wasn’t made up at all.”
As a lawyer, Gus refers to the tape as evidence. Something time can’t erase.
“People sort of remember the past the way they want to,” he says. “It’s filtered. I always tell my students, ‘We’re going to look at things as they are, not the way we want them to be.'”
AFTER A PLATE of branzino and Brussels sprouts, Jonathan Martin sinks into a leather couch in a library behind the dining area at a Philadelphia bistro. He’s upbeat. He fidgets with pieces on an oversized marble tic-tac-toe board on a table in front of him and describes a crypto hedge fund he and two classmates founded. “It’s something that doesn’t exist. It’s a new product,” he says. “It’s a new strategy.”
Martin is the CEO of the fund but also in charge of investor relations. He meets people, shakes hands, builds rapport. He also works the phones.
“We are all constantly growing and evolving,” he says. “I’m not the same person I was 10 years ago. I’m not the same person I was two years ago. So my goal is to always self-improve and then grow.”
He wears a T-shirt from his El Salvador Bitcoin trip. He stops shuffling the game pieces and lifts his head.
“There are some similar personalities between the NFL and people in finance and people going to business school,” he says. “There’s a little bit of you have to really believe in yourself a lot to play on ‘Monday Night Football’ and block someone that’s paid $25 million a year to get sacks against the quarterback.
“You’ve got to really have a lot of confidence in yourself. It’s similar when you work in finance with huge dollar amounts, gargantuan dollar amounts. You have to have a lot of confidence in yourself and your abilities. And the way that you build confidence is through practice.”
He might make 50 calls in a given day, laying out his belief in the idea. “My real talent is relationships,” he says.
Across the room, people come and go.
“The thought of losing is what gets my juices going,” he says. “It’s not even so much winning. I just don’t want to be a loser. I hate losers. I hate losing.”
He sounds like an offensive tackle. He speaks deliberately.
“There’s some sharp personalities in finance,” he says, “and I’ll just be like, ‘I went to better schools than you. I’m smarter than you. You will respect me. You don’t have to like me. You will respect me. When you address me, you will call me Jonathan Martin: Stanford, Georgetown, Wharton graduate.'”
Now he sounds like an Ivy League grad. He talks of using a “multi-sig” cryptocurrency wallet to enhance his security. He inhales books about the debt cycle. He takes notes that outgrow the margins of the pages and spill onto dozens of pieces of paper. This feels like studying tax code, but he does it for fun — and because he is reaching for something else.
“I want to be a master. I want to be the Tyrannosaurus rex. I want to be the lion. I want to be the great white shark,” Martin says later. “No peers. Nothing can threaten me, so I put in the work. And that’s the goal in torturing myself with homework in my 30s, is to be the apex predator.”
MARTIN HASN’T TALKED with Richie Incognito or any of the others linked to the incidents in Miami in the years since.
“But I don’t have any hard feelings towards anybody from that situation anymore,” he says, “because Richie Incognito and Mike Pouncey already peaked. They’ve already achieved the most success they’re going to achieve in their life. And I’m just getting started.”
He pauses.
“John Jerry, too.”
Would he consider a conversation with them now?
“No,” he says after a long pause.
Why not?
Martin doesn’t answer.
How would he handle confrontation differently now?
“I respect everyone. I give everyone a chance,” he says. “I’ll be nice to you, smile on my face. If you disrespect me, I’ll rip your f—ing head off.”
By text he reaches out later to clarify his answer: “‘Rip your head off’ was a metaphor, speaking to competitive fire,” he says. “It is not a threat. I am not threatening towards anyone. I follow the rules & I’m polite + respectful.”
Reached by phone at home in Arizona, Incognito said he “respectfully declined to comment” for this story. Messages left for Pouncey and Jerry were not returned.
IN DECEMBER, MARTIN texts to say he went home for Thanksgiving. He spent four days with his parents.
“I do forgive my mother now,” he says.
He speaks to a break between what happened then and where he might go now. “Time. And the realization that I’m right where I need to be,” he says.
“Dating an amazing girl, and 4 months from finishing my 3rd degree, which football all paid for,” he says. “I don’t wish I would’ve played longer even for a second, just wish the ending would have been different.”
He texts again three days later: “I also got an interview with my ideal company. . So again life has improved recently. Much more optimistic on a job. I’m in a different place than a year ago.”
He wants his story to be told fairly, he says. Doesn’t want to in any way harm his job prospects. He wants to close a chapter, he says. But he wants to talk again, to make clear how things have changed for him since he first agreed to tell his story, to present himself as he is today.
By Zoom in January, from his Philadelphia apartment, Martin says he’s looking forward to his graduation from Wharton in May. New stories need blank pages.
He speaks about the crypto hedge fund. Yes, he left it in April. Yes, he might return to it eventually. “Split amicably,” he says.
He talks about Philbin: “I do regret not talking to him man-to-man, eye-to-eye, and explaining the situation because he would have understood.”
He says he didn’t know his father still had the Incognito voicemail.
“We know who Incognito is, right?” Martin says. “I have more colorful language I could use, but I’m not going to.”
And he talks about his mother, too.
“I can appreciate that my mother loves me and she wanted to protect me,” Martin says. “And I am thankful to have both my parents still in my life in my 30s. Not everyone has that. I’m thankful for the time I still have with them. And …”
And then he pauses.
Looking into the future means moving on from the past. Or trying to. Or wishing you can.
“It’s a way to move forward,” he says one more time.
