(3 October 1998 - 2002) (divorced)
Jones is a 1997 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While there, she met and began dating one of the track coaches, shot putter C.J. Hunter. Hunter voluntarily resigned his position at UNC to comply with the requirements of university rules prohibiting coach/athlete dating. Jones and Hunter were married October 3, 1998, and trained for the Sydney 2000 Summer Olympics.
In the run-up to the 2000 Olympics, all eyes were on Marion Jones, who had announced at a press conference during her pre-Olympic book-signing tour that she intended to win gold medals in all five of her competition events at Sydney. Lost in the hoopla and the publicity was a low-key announcement that Jones' husband C.J. Hunter had quietly withdrawn from the Shot Put competition due to a knee injury, though he was allowed to keep his coaching credentials and attend the games to support his wife. However, just hours after Marion Jones won her first of the planned five golds, the IOC announced that Hunter had failed no fewer than four pre-Olympic drug tests, testing positive each time for the banned anabolic steroid nandrolone. Hunter was immediately suspended from taking any role at the Sydney games, and he was ordered to surrender his on-field coaching credentials. At a press conference where Hunter broke down in tears as a subdued Marion Jones sat by his side, Hunter denied taking any performance enhancing drugs at all, much less the easily detected nandrolone (which showed up in all four tests in amounts over 1000 times normal levels); Victor Conte of BALCO, who was regularly supplying "nutritional supplements" to Graham's athletes, blamed the test results on "an iron supplement" that contained nandrolone precursors and tied previous positive nandrolone tests from Jamaican sprinter Merlene Ottey and British sprinter Linford Christie to the same supplement. As late as 2004, Hunter was still denying the charges and was attempting to gain access to the results to see if they could be analyzed further. Jones would later write in her autobiography, Marion Jones: Life in the Fast Lane, that Hunter's positive drug tests hurt their marriage and her image as a drug-free athlete. The couple divorced in 2002.