Bobby Petrino Claimed He Started Seeing Jessica Dorrell In October, Ended Things In February

On April 10, the day Arkansas fired Bobby Petrino, the outgoing coach sat down with athletic director Jeff Long. Petrino gave Long some details of his relationship with Jessica Dorrell, and Long's handwritten notes were included in a personnel file released by the university today.

Petrino said that his relationship with Dorrell only became physical in October, during a lunch outing. (Dorrell was at that time involved with the Razorback Foundation's fundraising.) Chris Bahn, editor of ArkansasSports360, reports that the phrase "Are you ever going to kiss me?" made an appearance.

Petrino told Long that in early February the two decided to just be friends. This was a month before Dorrell was hired to a position with the football team, and the correspondence between the two didn't appreciably decrease. Arkansas knows this, because someone in the athletic department took the time to tally the number of phone calls and texts. (Bahn posted the image on Twitter. Read from the bottom up.)

(Of note: there was a major dropoff in texts in November. It was around this time Petrino upgraded iPhones and presumably installed iOS 5, so his SMS could have been replaced by iMessage. That's our working theory anyway.)

It's interesting to note that Arkansas's phone logs for Petrino dates back earlier than what was released to the press. The earliest contact between the two was in March or April, though the texting really went through the roof over the summer—a couple of months before Petrino told Long the relationship was consummated.

Petrino's correspondence with Alison Melder, the bikini-model-turned-Young-Republican, petered out in early November—soon after he began his relationship with Dorrell. (As our phone records only start in September, we don't know how long Petrino was in contact with Melder before then.)

At Petrino's April 3 press conference (the neck brace one), a PR staffer warned him to "be sure to think of anything else that could be an issue." There was no mention of Dorrell at that point, until the police report came out two days later and Petrino was forced to admit to "a previous inappropriate relationship." Petrino's comments to Long, claiming the relationship was broken off in February, would back up the "previous" part of that assertion. It wouldn't explain why she was on the back of his Harley on the first day of April.