Washington Football Team owner Daniel Snyder has asked a federal court in California to permit him to search and examine former team president Bruce Allen’s text messages and other communications.
Snyder's lawyers allege Allen may be the source of unsubstantiated claims and negative reporting and have knowledge about a pair of defamatory stories published about Snyder last year, according to documents filed Thursday in U.S. District Court reviewed by The Team 980.
The latest court filing in California seeks access to Allen’s communication and is in connection with a defamation lawsuit Snyder filed in India against a website named MEA WorldWide in August 2020. Snyder’s lawyers allege the website published a series of “flagrantly false statements” about Snyder’s role in sexual misconduct and sex trafficking published in July 2020.
The latest filing alleges Allen "participated in 87 separate phone calls totaling an astonishing 1,237 minutes (nearly 21 hours) with Mr. John Moag the investment banker for the now 3 former minority owners" of the Washington Football Team.
Minority owners Dwight Schar, Frederick W. Smith, and Robert Rothman hired Moag to facilitate the sale of their 40 percent stake of the team in 2020. After a months-long dispute that resulted in several lawsuits, Snyder won NFL approval and completed the purchase of the minority owner’s stake for $875 million in early April.
Snyder’s lawyers allege, in the 6 weeks leading up to the publication of the articles by MEA WorldWide, Allen and Moag spoke 21 times for 4.5 hours, adding, and “given that [Allen] no longer held a position with the Team as of 2019, [he] had no valid business reason for speaking with Mr. Moag during that time period.”
Allen was fired by Snyder after ten years with the organization in December 2019.
“These calls are notable not only for their frequency and length, but for the fact that Mr. Moag himself had extensive contact with representatives of the media both before and after the publication of [articles by MEA WorldWide], and also has exhibited advanced knowledge of forthcoming negative articles about [Snyder]," the court filing reads.
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Snyder's lawyers write these phone calls took place while Moag was speaking with members of the press "most notably The Washington Post, which published a series of negative articles about [Snyder] and the Team" on the same date as the articles published by MEA WorldWide.
“Notably, despite [Allen’s] prominent position and hands-on role in running the Team during the time period discussed in many of these negative articles, [Allen’s] name rarely, if ever, was mentioned in these articles [published by The Post] – and was completely absent” from articles published by MEA WorldWide, the filing reads.
“This glaring omission raises further questions about [Allen’s] possible role in and/or knowledge of the creation, solicitation, drafting and publication of the Defamatory Articles,” the court filing reads.
In an earlier court filing in a separate case, The Post reported Moag sent Snyder a text which threatened the leaking of damaging information: “If you continue your game, you know what I know and what I have never spoken about. And you know it has nothing to do about the media s--- ... it’s the more serious s---.
“If you want to get to a clean conclusion, let me know,” Moag wrote. “If you want a s--- show, we are on for that too.”
Snyder’s lawyers hope a federal judge grants them permission to examine “emails, text messages, electronic and physical notes, call records, and other documents — that would demonstrate [Allen’s] connections to the media, including MEAWW, as well as third parties hostile to [Snyder], and the coordination between each of the foregoing to disparage and defame” the Washington Football Team owner.
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