Washington Football owner Dan Snyder has come under intense scrutiny following the release of a Washington Post report linking him to sexual harassment inside his organization.
Hours after the investigative report went public, Snyder issued a combative public statement hammering The Post for authoring a 'hit job' against him that relied on, in his words, "unnamed sources and allegations that are largely ten to twenty years old."
Will Hobson, a co-author on the report, is pushing back against Snyder's narrative, revealing to The Sports Junkies that the Washington owner tried to have the parts of the story about him removed before publication.
The Washington Post had been in communication with Snyder's representation prior to publishing its report, affording Snyder an opportunity to respond to the allegations ahead of time, but Snyder declined.
"There was some dispute over whether or not those conversations were on the record," Hobson told The Sports Junkies Thursday morning. "We viewed part of them as on the record, and now apparently they all are, because Dan put out that statement."
"There was this protracted back and forth between us as reporters and editors and then representatives of Dan, a PR firm and a lawyer," Hobson explained. "And they ultimately refused to offer any type of on-the-record statement, which is unusual in these circumstances. And effectively what that bought them was about eight hours of the story being online yesterday with no comment from them, and then they published the statement that I think is basically what they would have given to us, and then we incorporated it in the story, which we would have done if they had given it to us before we published the story."
"So I was a little confused by the strategy there, but you are correct in inferring that, yeah, there was a back and forth," he said. "They were basically trying to convince us to delete whole sections of the story, and we told them we were not going to do that, so they just waited until after the story was out to put out their statement."
Tiffany Bacon Scourby, a former cheerleader for the team, accused Snyder of humiliating her, "the first such claim made to The Post," the report noted. Scourby alleged Snyder had approached her at a 2004 charity event, suggesting she join his close friend in a hotel room so they "could get to know each other better."
Snyder denied this allegation in his statement, saying: "We are disappointed that Ms. Scourby would speak to the newspaper but never bring any of these allegations to management’s attention, particularly since she is still part of our organization as a volunteer with our cheerleaders. I want to unequivocally state that this never happened. Ms. Scourby did not report this alleged incident to anyone at the team in 2004, in her 8 years as a cheerleader, or at any time in the past 16 years."
Snyder "didn't want the Scourby stuff in the story at all," Hobson said.
Snyder attempted to quash another key component of the story, according to Hobson, the allegation that the team surreptitiously produced private videos of cheerleaders, made from outtake footage taken from a 2008 photo shoot.
"What the cheerleaders didn’t know," The Post described, "was that another video, intended strictly for private use, would be produced using footage from that same shoot. Set to classic rock, the 10-minute unofficial video featured moments when nipples were inadvertently exposed as the women shifted positions or adjusted props."
Snyder denied ever having any knowledge of the videos in his statement and mentioned how the organization had requested copies of them from The Post for the purpose of having them "forensically evaluated and authenticated."
"With regard to the videos, we repeatedly made the same offer to them we have made to cheerleaders and their attorneys," Hobson said. "We will let you see these videos so you know they are real and we can get your response.
"The team wanted to physically, they wanted us to give them the hard files. That was a non-starter for us because potentially they could do something to try to identify our source."
"I do not have any knowledge of the ten-year-old videos referenced in the story," Snyder said. "I did not request their creation and I never saw them. There are former employees on the record stating that this did not happen. The unnamed sources who claim it did happen are relying on three degrees of hearsay. After an extensive review of our video archives, we believe these videos to be unauthorized or fraudulent. We requested that the Post provide us with copies of these videos to be forensically evaluated and authenticated, but The Washington Post refused to do so."
"Their contention that they needed to do forensic analysis to confirm the authenticity of these videos was, I viewed it as borderline absurd," Hobson said. "We went ahead and did it anyway, from a reporting perspective."
"But just to be clear," Hobson added, "these are not like cell phone videos from somebody who could have been like hanging out on the beach in Aruba in '08. A lot of these shoots were closed shoots where the only camera there was being held by a team staffer or a team contractor."
"So, really the only question then is, it's clearly footage that was shot by a team employee," he said. "Then the question is where was it made and who was involved with its production?"
