Shayanna Jenkins said Wednesday she was unaware that her longtime boyfriend and the father of their daughter, former New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez, was bisexual, but that she “would not have loved him differently” if he had shared the information with her.
In an interview aired on “Good Morning America,” Jenkins talked about her life with Hernandez, who died by suicide in 2017 in his state prison cell where he was serving life without parole for murdering his friend, Odin L. Lloyd, in North Attleborough in 2013. Hernandez was 27 years old and had been acquitted of a double murder in Boston’s South End just days before his death.
Jenkins, who testified as a prosecution witness during the murder trial, said she remains convinced of Hernandez’s innocence. But the majority of her conversation focused on Hernandez’s sexuality, which was disclosed by the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team in 2018 and is also discussed in the docuseries about Hernandez now available on Netflix.
“Although I have had a child with Aaron, I still can’t tell you how he was feeling inside,” said Jenkins, who started dating Hernandez when both were in high school in New Britain, Conn. “If he did feel that way, or feel the urge, I wish I was told … I would not have loved him differently. I would have understood. It’s not shameful.”
Jenkins said she was offered “compensation” to be interviewed by the producers of the docuseries, but declined to participate. “For my part, I wanted to leave it in the past,” she said.
Both the Globe and the Netflix series obtained telephone recordings made while Hernandez was in jail awaiting trial. Jenkins said it was hard to hear some of the conversations, including listening to her now 8-year-old daughter giggle while she was on the phone with Hernandez. “Those are the things as a mother you want to keep to yourself,” she said. “It’s hard to listen to.”
Jenkins said she continues to believe in Hernandez’s innocence. Bristol County prosecutors charged Jenkins with perjury but dropped the charges after Jenkins testified during the Lloyd trial. She told jurors that the day after the killing of Lloyd, she removed a box from the couple’s North Attleborough home at Hernandez’s direction and discarded it. Authorities believed the box contained the murder weapon, which was never found.
She said she will make sure that her daughter knows that Hernandez “was a loving individual who obviously loved her” but will also let her make up her own mind about her father’s entire life story.
An autopsy showed that Hernandez suffered from the brain disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative process that can cause troubling behavior, disturbed moods, and impaired thinking years or even decades later. The illness is caused by repeated blows to the head, researchers have concluded.
— BOSTON GLOBE
