NFL Emails Scandal (Gruden thread expanded)

[Ann]

Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder hires firm to investigate allegations of sexual harassment
 

The Washington Commanders have hired an independent investigative team to look into Tiffani Johnston's allegations of sexual harassment against team owner Dan Snyder.
 

The Commanders announced Wednesday that Pallas Global Group LLC, led by former Assistant United States Attorneys Bonnie Jonas and Tiffany Moller, will manage the investigation.
 

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The Commanders said Yang will "report her findings to Pallas Global Group, and those findings will be released to the public" at the conclusion of the investigation.
 

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[Ann]

NFL loses its first battle to strike down Jon Gruden’s lawsuit against the league
 

The NFL suddenly has a serious legal fight on its hands from ousted Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden, who won a sizable courtroom battle against the league on Wednesday.
 

A judge denied two key motions filed by NFL attorneys — first ruling against the league’s attempt to force the litigation into private arbitration, then denying a second motion to have Gruden’s lawsuit dismissed entirely. Instead, Nevada 8th Judicial District Court Judge Nancy Allf ruled that the case could continue forward in open court, which is far more transparent than the sealed arbitration process the league was seeking.
 

The NFL plans to appeal both rulings.
 

They were significant wins for Gruden, who is suing for damages in response to what he alleges was an “orchestrated campaign” by the NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell to destroy his “career and reputation” through the leaking of racist, homophobic and misogynistic emails between Gruden and former Washington executive Bruce Allen. The emails were sent between 2010 and 2018, prior to Gruden’s hiring by the Raiders.
 

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[Nanker]

The EN EF EL is dead wrong in this debacle. I hope Gruden wins and it costs The League so much that Goodell get fired. 

[Ann]

22 hours ago, Nanker said:

The EN EF EL is dead wrong in this debacle. I hope Gruden wins and it costs The League so much that Goodell get fired. 

Agreed

[Crap Throwing Clavin]

22 hours ago, Nanker said:

The EN EF EL is dead wrong in this debacle. I hope Gruden wins and it costs The League so much that Goodell get fired. 

 

They're not wrong, because Gruden is racist. [/woke logic]

[Ann]

 

 

Jon Gruden’s agent decries “hit job,” believes Gruden will coach again

 

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Gruden’s agent, Bob Lamonte, recently spoke to Ira Kaufman of JoeBucsFan.com about, among other things, the former Bucs and Raiders coach. And Lamonte believes Gruden will coach again — presumably in the NFL.

 

“I really believe in my heart and soul he will coach again,” Lamonte said. “I’d be very surprised if he didn’t. My question is what did Jon really do? Most people wouldn’t want their private e-mails from 10 days ago looked at. That’s why if this were to go to trial, it would be devastating for the National Football League.”

 

That’s an ominous hint from Lamonte, suggesting that Gruden will perhaps try a good-for-goose-good-for-gander approach that consists of looking at emails sent by others in and around the league from the past decade.

 

“This wasn’t good for anybody,” Lamonte said of the fact that a small number of emails that Gruden sent to former Washington executive Bruce Allen were leaked to the media at a time when everything else about the investigation of Daniel Snyder’s franchise was, and still is, largely cloaked in secrecy. “That’s why he ended up suing the NFL and [Commissioner Roger] Goodell — because everyone knows it was wrong. You have 650,000 e-mails and his six were picked out . . . and he wasn’t even in the league. He prevailed in court and he will prevail again.”

 

Gruden won in court on the preliminary question of whether the case will be required to go to arbitration. The NFL undoubtedly will appeal that as far and long as it can, delaying the case for not months but years. Eventually, if the case remains in court, the identity of the leaker will be revealed. Although Gruden thinks it was Goodell, others think it was Snyder. The universe of potential suspects is small, because not many people had access to the information.

 

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[Ann]

Gruden

 

 

[Alaska Darin]

19 minutes ago, Ann said:

Gruden

 

 

Looks like he's not missing any meals.

[Ann]

This is a gossipy (and very long) article. The litigation should be "fun" for the NFL.


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Over the years, Goodell has responded to leaks from inside the league office by assembling his top staff and saying the league would be searching its phones and computers for communications with reporters. But after the Gruden leaks, league sources said, Goodell didn't hold that type of meeting; it's unclear why not.

 

Lawyers close to the NFL and to Gruden said the choice to leak to the Times over The Washington Post, a newspaper Snyder hates, was a dead giveaway that Snyder and those around him were behind the leaks. Two sources told ESPN that the same "playbook" that was used in the A-Rod lawsuit against MLB was used to leak the emails published by the Times.

 

"The same crew that helped Alex go after Manfred helped Snyder with the leaks," said another source who was briefed on how the Gruden leaks were engineered.

 

Gruden's legal team went as far as to research prior work by the reporters who received the leaks and found what it saw as favorable stories previously written about Dan and Tanya Snyder and Roc Nation. The Times' Rosman wrote a piece in February 2020 about Roc Nation's partnership with the NFL. The Journal's Beaton wrote in June 2021 about Dan and Tanya Snyder's efforts to reform the team's culture, including a rare on-the-record interview with Dan Snyder. The Wall Street Journal declined to comment.

 

"How stupid can you be?" said a source close to Snyder who was aware of the previous stories done by the reporters who reported on the leaked emails. "They left a trail in the dirt."

 

But another source who knows Perez disputed her involvement. The source said she had no reason to help Snyder and had distanced herself from him during her time on the Commanders' board. And Perez "had no knowledge that it [leaking] was even being contemplated," her attorney wrote to ESPN's counsel.

 

After Gruden was gone, Snyder had hoped to be welcomed back into the league for good. But his plan backfired. Goodell still refused to allow Snyder to attend league meetings.

 

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GRUDEN HAD HIS reasons to believe Goodell and the league office had it out for him. The reasons were planted by Al Davis, who taught Gruden to hate the NFL office from the moment he hired the coach in 1998, eight years before Goodell became commissioner. Davis often told Gruden that the executives at 345 Park Avenue played favorites -- classic Raiders paranoia. But it also stemmed from Davis suing the league for antitrust violations. Davis also was convinced that commissioner Pete Rozelle had personally killed a trade before the 1983 draft that would have sent John Elway to the Raiders, refusing to allow a generational quarterback to play for a renegade franchise.

 

But after becoming one of the game's best and most celebrated coaches, Gruden saw examples that the old man was right. How else to explain the since-eliminated Tuck Rule -- a rule Gruden had never heard of before -- that led to a Patriots playoff victory at the Raiders' expense in 2002? As the years passed, and Gruden won a Super Bowl with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and eventually moved to the "Monday Night Football" booth in 2009, his hatred of the league office grew. In 2011, Gruden was in an especially bad headspace, he later told friends, furious over the owners' lockout that offseason and that clubs had voted in 2009 to give teams the option to eliminate pension plans for assistant coaches and other employees.

His frustration came to a boil during a December 2011 Monday night game between the Falcons and the Saints. Atlanta linebacker Curtis Lofton delivered a helmet-to-helmet hit on receiver Marques Colston over the middle and was flagged for unnecessary roughness. To a national TV audience, Gruden stated his displeasure with the call. "I just don't understand how games are being officiated," Gruden said after a play on the next possession.

 

Gruden's commentary earned him a call from the league's Park Avenue headquarters. Over the phone, Goodell asked Gruden to come to the league office to meet with John Madden and Jeff Fisher. The purpose, as the commissioner explained, was for Gruden to get a lesson on player safety.

 

"You've got to be s---ting me," Gruden told Goodell.

 

Gruden wondered whether it was a joke, he later told associates. He needed a player safety lesson from Madden and Fisher, two coaches whose players had delivered some of the ugliest hits in NFL history? Gruden later told friends he felt that Goodell was treating him like a "stooge" who had "never coached in the league, like I don't study football day in and day out ... like I didn't know a damn thing about player safety."

 

Gruden never went to the league office for that meeting. The only time he ever met Goodell was years later, when he went to the league office to promote youth football, one of Gruden's passions. He expected to sit down with Goodell and plan a way to increase participation rates. Instead, Gruden met with an assistant of the commissioner. At the end of the session, Goodell entered a conference room, thanked Gruden for coming and left. Gruden fumed; after that brief meeting, Gruden never spoke again with Goodell.

 

Gruden burned with suspicion when Mark Davis was elbowed out of the three-team derby to relocate to Los Angeles in 2016 despite owning the most popular team in the market by far. Those feelings intensified in 2020 when Gruden was in his third year back as the Raiders' head coach. The league fined the Raiders $500,000, fined Gruden $150,000 and stripped the team of a sixth-round draft pick for COVID-19 violations -- and that was after the league had fined the team and Gruden a total of $350,000 for violations earlier in the season. (Davis offered to pay Gruden's $150,000 fine, but league officials insisted Gruden pay it personally, which he did.) Livid, Gruden appealed the fines but ended up writing the checks. After he did, his friend Sean Payton, then the Saints' coach and who also had been fined for COVID-19 violations, called him and laughed.

 

"I never paid the fine," Payton told Gruden, adding that other coaches also refused to pay. "You're the only dumbf--- that paid the fine."

 

Gruden continued coaching, disenchanted by what he saw as incompetence and overreach from NFL headquarters, from poor and inconsistent officiating to league office executives pressuring him to hire diverse coaches. Like many coaches, Gruden believed there was a massive disconnect between the dictates of 345 Park Avenue and the way the game is played on the field. In quiet moments, Gruden had designs on one day becoming commissioner. But at heart he knew he was a coach, and he never gave much thought to the offensive language that cost him his job. He knows he'll probably never be a head coach again; he's consulting now for the Saints, helping tutor veteran quarterback Derek Carr.

 

Gruden recently wondered aloud to associates why Dan Snyder would have had it out for him. He knew that Snyder hated Bruce Allen; Snyder had fired Allen in 2019, and the two were fighting over whether Snyder needed to pay the remainder of Allen's contract, sources said. And Gruden knew his brother Jay had shared some unsavory stories earlier in 2021 about working for Snyder, including telling the Post that the owner would "come in off his yacht" and pick players on the first day of the draft and override his coaches, scouts, everyone. Gruden thought back to an exchange with Snyder years earlier, when he had bumped into Snyder at a restaurant. Gruden believed Snyder was drunk, and he and Gruden started playfully trash-talking, with Snyder calling Gruden fat and Gruden saying he might "dribble his head into the asphalt." Both men laughed, but Gruden wondered if Snyder had taken offense.

 

Although the league initially expressed confidence that Gruden's lawsuit would be dismissed, Gruden has won every court motion against the NFL. The league has tried to move the case to arbitration, its venue of choice, where league-friendly lawyers are in charge and discovery, including communications between league officials and others, is not made public. Gruden's case is now on appeal by the NFL before the Nevada Supreme Court. A ruling is expected late this year.

 

League officials told ESPN that regardless of any bad blood between Goodell and Gruden, the commissioner wouldn't have approved leaking the emails, despite their racist tone. "He still wouldn't do it," a league source said. In NFL circles, it's believed that if not for the leaks, those emails would have remained buried in what owners and executives commonly refer to as "Jeff Pash's black box."

 

Gruden persists in believing that Goodell "pushed the code red" against him, he told associates, adding that the commissioner executed the "kill shot" on his career, "a bullet to the head." Gruden insists he won't settle his lawsuit for any amount, intending "to burn the house down" to reveal the truth about who ordered the leaks. "This was a massive hit job," Gruden recently told an associate, often saying Allen had told him the 650,000 emails "incriminate everyone in the league."

 

"Why would these people want to come and get me?" The only explanation, he said, is that he had led a leaguewide whispering campaign of "F--- Roger Goodell. And I'm not the only one, by the way. ... Deep down, I knew he -- Goodell -- had me by the balls."

 

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[Ann]

Really? 



 

Insider: “A Lot of People” Think Mark Davis Would Love to Bring Jon Gruden Back to the Raiders

(Sports Illustrated Hondo Carpenter on the Las Vegas Raiders Insider podcast)

 

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“I am going to tell you there are a lot of people who feel that Mark Davis, more than [Tom] Brady and Jim Gray, the person he trusts the most is Jon Gruden and would love to bring him back. I am hearing from multiple people around the league that if Jon were willing to drop his lawsuit, they believe the NFL would give a passive nod to go back and re-hire him… everyone keeps talking about Jon Gruden.”

 

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More from Hondo…

 

“A lot of people believe that Jon Gruden’s lawsuit is going to take Roger Goodell out and it’s going to embarrass a lot of people… now that Nevada courts continue to support [Gruden’s lawsuit] and now it’s coming up on potential discovery, and if you know anything about the legal system, in discovery, Jon’s going to be able to ask any question he wants. It doesn’t even have to be about him. He can say ‘I want to talk to this owner, I want to talk to that owner, I’d like to talk to Roger Goodell, or whomever,’ and Jon Gruden knows where every body is buried in the NFL.”