How the Brett Favre scandal derailed Jenn Sterger's dream

She was a bad girl gone good -- until Brett Favre brought her back down.

Jenn Sterger's winning physique rocketed her to national fame on Sept. 15, 2005, when a TV camera's pan of the bleachers found her sitting pretty in a tight pair of jeans shorts, a bikini top and a cowboy hat at the Florida State-University of Miami football game.

Overnight, Sterger, now 27, gained a cult following. She decided to move to New York to pursue a career as an actress and model.

She graced both Maxim and Playboy and began her stint as a "game-day hostess" for the Jets in 2008. The job was created for Sterger and entailed wearing cleavage-baring jerseys while reporting feature spots from the sidelines.

But in 2009, the vixen decided to shed her image as a walking pair of silicone 34Ds.

While in Tampa for Super Bowl week, she set her sights on manager Phil Reese.

"I thought she was very charismatic," Reese said in an exclusive interview, in which he agreed to tell the story of Sterger's dealings with sexual harassment and the NFL.

"We traded barbs throughout dinner," he recalled of their first meeting. "She was instantly likeable, and that's what I look for in clients. You can't teach someone how to light up a room at a pitch meeting. You either have it, or you don't, and she had it."

At the time, Sterger was living in Hoboken and working on "The Daily Line," a sports show on the Versus cable network. But she told Reese she harbored grander ambitions, he said.

"She obviously got a lot of mileage out of the implants, and it became a problem, professionally and personally," Reese said. "She wanted to be seen as Jenn, not as a chest."

Reese agreed to take her on as a client. But he couldn't predict how her sex-kitten past would come pawing back.

Sterger was Reese's only female client, he said, and he looked after her like a sister.

"She mentioned she wanted to get the implants removed, and I was all for it," said Reese, who scored her a spread in Cosmopolitan magazine, where she talked about removing her breast implants.

"My boobs were not only the first thing some producers saw," she wrote in the story. "They were also the only thing."

The magazine spread was supposed to be the beginning of a new chapter for Sterger, Reese said.

But less than a year later, her attempt to be acknowledged as something other than the "hot chick" derailed spectacularly.

On Oct. 7, 2010, the sports Web site Deadspin published e-mails, voice mails and pictures Sterger allegedly received from Favre when he was the Jets' quarterback.