Houston’s Fierce Superlawyer Who Battles Celebrities Like Diddy and Deshaun Watson — Here’s What Fuels His Relentless Fire!
Knowing there would be backlash when the news went public that the local sports hero was being accused of sexual misconduct, Buzbee texted his daughter a hypothetical situation, without naming names, so he could get an opinion of, as he says, “a liberal woman” at NYU about whether he should take on such a case. She texted back: Dad, isn’t this the reason you went to law school?
“She shamed me, basically,” he says. “But that’s how it all started.”
To date, settlements have been reached in all but one of the twenty-four cases involving Watson. Solis declined to comment. Watson, through his agent, also declined to comment. Hardin, who represented Watson but declined to talk about his case on the record, pointed out a pattern that Buzbee has repeated since the Watson case.
“What he’s done is—and Jay-Z said this—he’ll pick people who have a lot to lose in the world of public opinion,” Hardin tells me before launching into a rant and criticizing the media’s coverage of Buzbee. “I don’t have any faith any of you are going to tell the story the way it really is, and I really don’t want to spend my time being candid about Tony or seeing an article that makes him sound like the fucking second coming.”
Since taking on Watson, Buzbee has continued leaning into sexual-assault cases. He recently helped oversee a 1-800 hotline that collected hundreds of sexual-assault allegations against Combs that were deemed worthy of review. The hotline asked callers the same question: Were you or your loved one sexually abused by Sean “Love” Combs, known as Diddy, Puff Daddy, and P. Diddy? Combs’s attorneys did not respond to requests for comment but have previously noted that Buzbee was nothing more than a “1-800 attorney.”
Buzbee doesn’t hesitate to explain what has unfolded with the case of Sharpe, the ESPN host and popular podcaster. He says that the mediation went on for about six weeks and the Nevada woman suing Sharpe was offered $10 million to drop the case. The day after Sharpe released his video statement saying that the relationship was 100 percent consensual and said Buzbee is targeting Black men, Buzbee sent TMZ an audio recording of what appears to be Sharpe threatening to choke the woman in public. At that point, the story went nuclear.
“I didn’t wake up one morning and say, ‘I want to sue Shannon Sharpe.’ He has no relevance in my life. I actually think he’s very entertaining when he yells and screams and talks about sports that he’s not involved in,” he tells me. “But if I think it’s a legitimate case, then I pursue it. And I think this is worth my time.”
From across the desk, Buzbee appears irked when I bring up Sharpe’s assertion that the lawyer has been targeting Black men in these recent high-profile lawsuits. This is where the smartass in him comes out: “I guess a bunch of old white men could say I’m targeting them, and a bunch of multinational corporations could say I’m targeting them as well,” he says. “I guess you could say I was targeting BP.”
He gives it a quick think. “Well, I probably was targeting BP.”
At the time, Sharpe’s legal team disputed Buzbee’s version of the facts and challenged his tactics, providing this statement to Esquire: “While others appear intent on trying this case in the media, we will remain focused on the facts and the law. Shannon Sharpe has great faith in the justice system and looks forward to addressing these matters in the proper legal forum.”
On July 18, however, Buzbee announced that the two sides had reached a mutually agreed upon resolution to the suit. “All matters have now been addressed satisfactorily, and the matter is closed,” Buzbee wrote on X. “The lawsuit will thus be dismissed with prejudice.”
Neither side released details.
After the dismissal, Sharpe’s lead attorney, Michael Marino, gave this statement about the resolution of the lawsuit against his client: “Like many highly successful individuals, Tony Buzbee is a complex and formidable figure. In the matter involving Shannon Sharpe, although we stood on opposite sides of the legal aisle, our shared experience as former officers in the United States Marine Corps fostered a mutual respect that guided our discussions. That brotherhood enabled us to speak candidly and constructively, ultimately allowing us to reach a resolution that served the interests of all parties involved.”
As the profile of his cases has increased, so has the coverage and criticism of Buzbee, which he can’t help but brag about—“I obviously sell a lot of newspapers, but there’s a flip side to that and there’s a lot of bad to that.” The attention has admittedly taken a toll on Buzbee and his wife, Frances Moody Buzbee, of the prominent billionaire Moody family of Galveston.
“I don’t love conflict,” says Frances, a thirty-two-year-old philanthropist. “I worry about his safety because there’s a lot of people who are obsessed with him and love him, and also people who don’t love him. But Tony is a grown man, and I have to remember that he’s a Marine.”
Joanne King Herring, the American socialite and diplomat who collaborated with Representative Charlie Wilson to lobby the U.S. to support the mujahideen in Afghanistan (and inspired the events of Charlie Wilson’s War), was initially surprised that Frances Moody would marry Tony, who is twenty-five years older than his wife. And Herring didn’t know what to think of Buzbee when she first met him. (“Tony, you might say, is a wild boar in court.”) But she has become close friends with Buzbee, and marvels at the drive that it took for him to reach the success he has in life.
“He has to win,” Herring tells me. “Against all odds, he was a winner.”
At ten years old, Buzbee already had a lot of experience at knowing when his father was drunk. And he knew it that day at the bar when his old man wasn’t going to take shit from another inebriated customer. Even if that guy was literally half his size.
Bobby Glenn Buzbee was as perpetually angry as he was larger-than-life to his son growing up. A butcher at a local grocery who raised his family in Atlanta, Texas, a town of about five thousand near the Arkansas border, Bobby Glenn was well-known in the community as a guy you didn’t want to mess with. He liked to proudly declare, “I would fight at the drop of the hat—and I’ll drop the hat.”
Stories are casually shared about how Bobby Glenn got shot in the face and lost an eye. Or how, in a drunken stupor, he chased after the neighbor in the middle of the night in his tighty-whities because the neighbor’s son had dumped Buzbee’s stuff out the window of the school bus. Or how Bobby Glenn once got so liquored up that he paid to wrestle a muzzled bear at a bar in Texarkana.
On Saturday afternoons, after father and son picked up beer cans on the dirt roads so that Bobby Glenn could sell the aluminum, Buzbee, still in elementary school, would accompany his father to the same bar every weekend and quietly sit in the corner as he played pool for hours.
As Buzbee tells the story, one day there was a man at the bar with dwarfism who had obviously been drinking heavily. For some reason, the man decided to provoke Bobby Glenn. He started by staring at him. Then he began hitting the elder Buzbee’s pool stick just as he was trying to shoot. Bobby Glenn held his temper. But the guy wasn’t done. The breaking point, says Buzbee, came when the man kicked Bobby Glenn in the shin. The elder Buzbee snapped.
“He just hit that dwarf so hard and knocked him into the corner, and the guy just crumbled,” Buzbee says, estimating the guy went about ten feet. “I don’t know why that made such an impression on me. That was the last time I saw that guy. But that was how my childhood was.”
He adds of his dad, “You were always trying to please him, always trying to measure up— but my father is a very angry man.” (Bobby Glenn, now eighty-four, did not return multiple interview requests.)
Buzbee was one of four kids raised by Bobby Glenn and Buzbee’s mother, Patti, who worked in a school cafeteria and drove a school bus that she parked in the front yard. After graduating from Texas A&M, Buzbee joined the Marines and served tours in the Persian Gulf and Somalia, where he was a reconnaissance officer. As the weapons platoon commander for the 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, Buzbee delivered a message early to his squad while training in Coronado, California: I’m the best at everything, so don’t challenge me or get in trouble, because I will whoop your ass.
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