Former Las Vegas Raiders head coach Jon Gruden is suing the NFL and Commissioner Roger Goodell, claiming that they “sought to destroy” his career and reputation. He’s right.
Gruden’s lawsuit calls the NFL’s actions a “Soviet-style character assassination.” The complaint alleges that Gruden’s emails were singled out among the 650,000 emails that were part of the investigation into the culture of the Washington Football Team and that “there was no warning and no process. Defendants held the emails for months until they were leaked to the national media in the middle of the Raiders’ season in order to cause maximum damage to Gruden.”
Whether Gruden wins the damages he seeks, he is right about the process. Gruden was not a relevant factor in the investigation into Washington’s workplace culture. His emails, which were widely accused of being bigoted and which led to his forced resignation, were the only ones leaked. It isn’t unreasonable to think they were leaked only because Gruden had insulted Goodell in them.
The NFL’s investigation into Washington and its owner, Dan Snyder, concluded in the summer after 11 months. We still know almost nothing about the findings, but Gruden’s emails found their way to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. They were sprung on Gruden and the Raiders in the middle of the season with no advance warning. Raiders owner Mark Davis said the team found out about the emails from a Wall Street Journal reporter just hours before the piece went up, despite the NFL knowing about them for months.
Gruden was singled out for punishment because of an investigation that had nothing to do with him or his team. Even if it was not a “malicious and orchestrated campaign,” as his complaint alleges, it was clearly a targeted punishment that was completely irrelevant to the investigation at hand, which was about sexual harassment in an organization 2,400 miles away.
Gruden was a sacrificial lamb, offered up to take heat off of Snyder, one of the NFL’s own members. He was singled out for punishment because he was expendable. The entire process was inconsistent at best and shady at worst. It’s clear the NFL needs to explain what happened and how it reached the point where this was sprung on Gruden and the Raiders.
