A series of bombshell reports leading to Jon Gruden's ouster has left many in Washington wondering how Dan Snyder has managed to evade similar trouble.
Gruden resigned as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders Monday night after a series of reports, the first from The Wall Street Journal and the second from The New York Times, depicted Gruden making homophobic, misogynistic and even racists remarks in emails, in a digital paper trail that stretches back more than a decade.
A 2011 email showed Gruden mocking DeMaurice Smith, who's head of the NFL Players Association, for his intelligence, while using a racist trope to describe Smith's face. Gruden was working for ESPN at the time, a year when Smith emerged to national prominence for going toe to toe with NFL owners during a high-pressure work stoppage.
In other separate emails, Gruden was seen using a homophobic slur to criticize Roger Goodell, questioning the NFL commissioner for pressuring Jeff Fischer to draft Michael Sam, an openly gay player, in 2014. Gruden also denounced the admittance of female referees into the league and players protesting during the national anthem.
So where does Washington come in? Gruden's emails were all sent to Bruce Allen (and others), who was team president of the Washington Redskins from 2009 until his firing in Dec. 2019. And they were only discovered as part of a separate investigation into the workplace culture of the Washington organization, now named the Washington Football Team.
From the NYT report: "Gruden's emails to Allen, who was fired by the Washington Football Team at the end of 2019, were reviewed as part of an N.F.L. investigation of workplace misconduct within the franchise that ended this summer. Goodell instructed league executives to look at more than 650,000 emails during the past few months, including those in which Gruden made offensive remarks. Last week, Goodell received a summary of their findings and the league sent the Raiders some of the emails written by Gruden."
That investigation was led by prominent attorney Beth Wilkinson, who was tasked with examining years of sexual harassment claims — and other misdeeds — inside the Washington workplace. While many fans hoped to see the investigation result in some punishment for Snyder, Goodell, concluding that Wilkinson should condense her nearly year-long investigation down to an oral report, ultimately fined the organization $10 million while installing Tanya Snyder as co-CEO of the organization.
Dan Snyder was instructed to cede all day-to-day operations of the team over to his wife "for at least the next several months."
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Now, many are left scratching their heads, wondering how Wilkinson's investigation — the contents of which were never disclosed to the public — resulted in punishment for a coach who never ever worked for the organization but not the team owner.
Lisa Banks, an attorney representing more than 40 former Washington employees who participated in Wilkinson's investigation, has repeatedly called on the NFL to release the results of that investigation to the public while maintaining a highly critical public face towards the league's secrecy. Gruden's resignation has prompted her to again call on the league to be transparent about the Wilkinson investigation.
With regards to Wilkinson's investigation, the question has always been whether the general public could mount enough pressure to compel the NFL to release its findings. Now that the NFL has tacitly admitted – through various reports – to the existence of 650,000 emails in its stockpile of evidence, it would seem a strange tact to revert back to pretending they don't exist. Not only does the public now know they exist, it also knows they've been utilized to generate punitive measures.
In the case of Jon Gruden, at least.
