fatness
Footballguy
For some reason I could read that WSJ article.
Before the emails that prompted Jon Gruden to resign as coach of the Las Vegas Raiders became public over the past week, some of them made a little-noticed and redacted appearance in another public forum: a discovery motion Washington Football Team owner Daniel Snyder had filed in April.
Snyder sought to learn who had leaked false information to an India-based media outlet that he contended wrongly connected him to Jeffrey Epstein. Snyder’s lawyers asked a U.S. court to compel the production of evidence they wanted: emails, texts and phone records of Bruce Allen, his team’s former president and general manager.
Allen had vehemently denied that he was a source for the article. “I maintained a low profile with respect to the media, rarely participating in press conferences or otherwise interfacing or even speaking with reporters,” he told the court in a declaration in May. He said he had never been an anonymous source for any news or media reports.
On June 19, Snyder responded. He provided old emails from Allen’s work account before his departure from the team in 2019. Snyder included as exhibits at least a dozen examples of Allen planning to meet, serve as a source or trade gossip with reporters.
The emails also included messages that Snyder said, in the court filing, showed how, “Mr. Allen spread negative media narratives against his enemies in the football world by spoon-feeding talking points…to a popular then-current ESPN on-air personality (the “ESPN Personality”).”
In those messages, with some names and letters redacted in the filings, Allen wrote about “ESPN sl*ts” and lashed out at various NFL figures. The recipient, meanwhile, worried about a team being told to “draft que**s,” referred to an NFL figure as a “clueless anti football p***y” and seemed to say of a national anthem protester: “they should cut this f**k.”
Within weeks, those same emails were part of a broader NFL investigation into more than 650,000 emails sent to and from Allen. And when many of them became public—in unredacted form—over the past week, it quickly led to the downfall of the ESPN personality who was cited anonymously in them: Jon Gruden.
Gruden resigned as coach of the Las Vegas Raiders on Monday night in the wake of an email scandal that has sent shock waves through America’s most popular sport.
After The Wall Street Journal first reported last week on the email investigation and Gruden’s use of a racial trope to describe NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith in a 2011 email to Allen, Gruden coached his team’s game Sunday. Further emails in which Gruden used antigay and other offensive language were published by the New York Times on Monday. The Los Angeles Times previously reported on some of the redacted emails in the court case.
Snyder’s previous public use of the emails that later led to Gruden’s resignation show that the coach was caught in the crossfire of a battle that had nothing to do with him.
The NFL first learned of troubling emails in June—just before the end of the investigation of workplace misconduct inside the Washington Football Team that finished this summer, people familiar with the matter said. The people declined to say whether Snyder flagged the emails to the NFL. The court filings by Snyder’s lawyers came on June 19.
On July 1, the NFL responded to the conclusion of the workplace investigation by slapping the Washington Football Team with a record $10 million fine. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell described the team’s work environment as “highly unprofessional,” especially in the treatment of women.
But the giant batch of 650,000 emails the NFL had learned of as the investigation was wrapping up were determined to be a separate matter from the workplace probe, the people said. The league launched a separate probe of those emails focusing on Allen and Gruden.
Allen and his attorney have not responded to requests for comment.
In a court filing, as part of the same case, Allen argued that the work emails shown by Snyder were “irrelevant” and that Snyder’s “improper” use of them showed how the team owner would attempt to use Allen’s personal email, texts and phone records if the court allowed him access.
Although Gruden never worked for the Washington Football Team, he had a close connection with its longtime top executive. Gruden and Allen worked together at both the then-Oakland Raiders and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers—with Gruden as the head coach and Allen in the front office. They were both fired from Tampa Bay after the 2008 season.
Gruden went on to work at ESPN, where he called Monday Night Football games, while Allen rose to become president of the Washington Football Team during a decade there until late 2019. The pair emailed frequently over those years, with those emails showing up in the NFL’s investigation of Allen’s inbox. Gruden’s brother, Jay, was also coach of Washington from 2014 to 2019.
Allen, the son of legendary Washington coach George Allen, was fired in 2019 but was embroiled in its affairs for years afterward. His tenure with Washington coincided with years covered by the workplace misconduct investigation, which began after the Washington Post reported 15 women who worked for the franchise experienced sexual or verbal harassment. Snyder denied wrongdoing in a pair of alleged incidents involving him.
Then this year, Allen was the target of the legal filings made by Snyder in connection with the defamation case. An Indian website, meaww.com, had attempted to connect Snyder with disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—with no evidence to support the claim. Other filings by Snyder also implied a connection between Allen and the minority owners, with whom Snyder had an explosive dispute.
Months later, the emails that Snyder provided to the court became public, without the redactions. They include one in which the “Redacted – ESPN Personality,” now known to be Gruden, told Allen that Goodell shouldn’t have pressured then-Rams coach Jeff Fisher to “draft queers,” a reference to the team’s 2014 choice of Michael Sam.
Fisher, in a statement Tuesday, said he drafted Sam based on his abilities, adding that the league has never directed him who to draft and that sexual orientation played no role in his selection of any prospect.
The NFL’s probe into these emails burst into public last Friday when The Journal reported one from 2011 that was not in Snyder’s June court filing, in which Gruden mocks NFL Players’ Association executive director DeMaurice Smith using a racial trop. “Dumboriss Smith has lips the size of michellin tires,” he wrote to Allen.
Gruden was out of a job by Monday.
The Snyder lawsuit that had initially exposed some of the Gruden emails was also no more: his petition to gain access to more of Allen’s communications was dismissed by the Arizona court in August.