What caused Jones to finally stop lying about her use of steroids and admit to the use of the notorious, BALCO-produced “clear”?
Jones had been denying any use of performance-enhancing drugs for nearly six years. She carried her lies to the extreme of filing a $25 million lawsuit against Victor Conte, the founder of BALCO, who said he saw Jones using his then-undetectable “clear.” Even worse than her lies in news conferences and the lawsuit, she lied to federal investigators when asked about the “clear.” Like so many elite athletes before her, she apparently didn’t believe she would ever be caught. But when finally confronted by evidence gathered by IRS agent Jeff Novitsky and his crew in northern California, she must have realized she had lied herself into a corner. When she and her attorneys measured the evidence against her, they concluded the time had come to admit the truth and beg for mercy. What evidence did the government have that destroyed Jones’ attempts to claim she had never used the “clear”? In the original raid on BALCO in 2002, agents found records of Jones’ use of performance-enhancing drugs, in
