In October 2016, a Texas court received a filing from Rebecca Liddicoat’s attorney, formally denying the claims made in her husband’s divorce petition. Her husband was NFL quarterback Robert Griffin III, known to football fans as RG3. Liddicoat, his first wife and the mother of his eldest daughter, has not given an interview since.
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Meeting Robert Griffin III at Baylor
Liddicoat grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and enrolled at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she studied biology and served as president of Chi, one of the school’s student service organizations. She met Griffin in March 2009 through a mutual friend on campus, and graduated the following year. According to an account later published in Baylor’s own alumni magazine, she wasn’t particularly won over by him at first, put off by the cartoon character socks he wore around campus. Griffin, by his own account, had just come out of a bad relationship and wasn’t looking for anything serious.
That changed within a couple of years. Griffin won the Heisman Trophy in December 2011 and was drafted second overall by the Washington Redskins the following spring. Liddicoat appeared next to him at the events that followed, including the draft itself, the ESPYs that July, and Redskins training camp. At some point before the wedding, he proposed at Baylor’s indoor practice facility, using a ring that had belonged to his father while a teammate played guitar.
The Wedding, and the Years After
The lead-up to the wedding produced one moment of overblown controversy. A gift registry set up under the couple’s names drew public criticism from ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, criticism Bleacher Report later characterized as baseless and quickly forgotten. A few months before the ceremony itself, a video of Griffin and Liddicoat rapping about candy also made the rounds online after he posted it to Facebook.
They married on July 6, 2013, at the Four Seasons in Denver, a short drive from where Liddicoat grew up. NFL.com and the Denver Post both covered the ceremony directly. Mike Shanahan and Art Briles were there. So were several of Griffin’s Washington teammates, including Kirk Cousins, Santana Moss and DeAngelo Hall.
Griffin announced on Twitter, on his own birthday in February 2015, that the couple was expecting their first child. Reese Ann Griffin was born on May 21, 2015.
What Actually Happened in the Divorce
Signs of trouble appeared on social media well before anything became official. On Mother’s Day 2016, Griffin referred to Liddicoat only as “Reese’s mom” in a post, not by name. Their third anniversary that July passed without a mention, a departure from the year before. Around the same time, Griffin had reportedly connected on Instagram with Grete Sadeiko, an Estonian heptathlete.
Cleveland.com broke the news on August 16, 2016, that the couple had been separated for months and were heading for divorce. Griffin filed the paperwork on September 7, 2016. Liddicoat responded the following month, denying the claims in his petition and asking the court to make him, as the higher earner in the marriage, cover her legal fees. Griffin later said publicly that the marriage had simply not worked, denying that his relationship with Sadeiko was the cause.
Most coverage of the case gets one detail wrong. It is often reported that the divorce was finalized in August 2016, the same month the separation became public. That is not accurate. A Texas judge approved a settlement based on the couple’s prenuptial agreement in the spring of 2017.
Liddicoat challenged those terms within weeks, arguing Griffin had not paid her the share of their Texas home the agreement entitled her to. The house had cost $2.2 million and was worth more than $3 million by the time they separated. The two sides did not agree on final terms until late July 2017, nearly a year after the divorce was first reported.
The settlement gave Liddicoat $1.1 million, full custody of Reese Ann, and ongoing financial support. Griffin married Sadeiko in March 2018, and the couple has since had three more daughters. He later became a television analyst, first for ESPN and now for Fox Sports, where he covers college football.
Where Rebecca Liddicoat Is Now
There is no reliable answer to that question. No outlet with an identifiable source has reported on her life since the settlement closed in 2017. Estimates of her net worth that circulate now range from $400,000 to $5 million, a spread wide enough to suggest none of it is based on anything concrete.
A Texas high school gets attached to her biography on several sites that also credit her with parents and a sister no contemporary report ever named. That high school, going by Griffin’s own public record, is where he grew up, not her.
In the summer of 2017, after nearly a year of contested filings, Rebecca Liddicoat secured full custody of her daughter and the money Griffin had agreed, under their prenuptial agreement, to pay her. Nothing filed publicly in the years since has added anything to that record.
