Six former employees appeared on Capitol Hill on Thursday, speaking before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform to share their personal experiences dealing with sexual harassment while working for the Washington Commanders.
While all of their accounts are certainly worth your time, Tiffani A. Johnston described one night in particular which still sticks with her today — unforgettable for all of the wrong reasons. Johnston was a Washington cheerleader from 2007 to 2008, and also served as marketing director and events coordinator for club level tickets (2002-2008).
Johnston's time as a Washington cheerleader happens to coincide with the timeline of events established in a previous Washington Post report detailing a 2008 calendar shoot, from which lewd outtakes were allegedly taken — featuring cheerleaders with their bodies exposed — to be used to produce a private video. Allegedly made for Dan Snyder, according to The Washington Post, the video was produced without the cheerleaders' knowledge. The video was referred to as 'the good bits.'
Johnston prefaced her testimony by saying she learned a lot in her early twenties from working for the team. All of her examples, however, were things one should not have to learn from working in a fair and equal workplace in which all employees are respected. For instance, Johnston first learned she should "wear low-cut blouses when making sales pitches" to potential suite owners. And, one marketing meeting with her boss and male co-workers, she learned a new meaning for a 'pearl necklace.'
"And it's not the kind you receive from your grandmother at eighth-grade graduation," she said. "For those of you who didn't know, like my mom, it's an offensive sexual term."
Johnston said she learned from a high-level executive inside the organization that the best way to avoid an uncomfortable situation in front of potential suite owners was to "just do what my boss asks, which on one occasion, involved him tossing me in the air to do a cheerleader stunt for a client while I was wearing a skirt."
In her next example, Johnston directly accused Washington owner Dan Snyder of making an unwanted sexual advance towards her and, later that same evening, attempting to "aggressively" push her into his limousine. Here is her testimony about that one particular account uninterrupted:
"I learned on one specific occasion that when I was asked by my boss to attend a networking event — and, oh, to dress cute — it was actually an orchestration by him and Dan Snyder to put me in a compromising sexual situation," Johnston said. "I learned that placing me strategically by the owner at a work dinner after this networking event was not for me to discuss business, but to allow him, Dan Snyder, to place his hand on my thigh under the table.
"I learned how to discretely remove a man's unwanted hand form my thigh at a crowded dinner table, at a busy restaurant, to avoid a scene. I learned that job survival meant I should continue my conversation with another coworker rather than call out Dan Snyder right then in the moment. I also learned later that evening how to awkwardly laugh when Dan Snyder aggressively pushed me towards his limo with his hand on my lower back, encouraging me to ride with him to my car.
"I learned how to continue to say no, even though the situation was getting more awkward, uncomfortable, and physical. I learned that the only reason Dan Snyder removed his hand from my back and stopped pushing me towards his limo was because his attorney intervened and said, 'Dan. Dan. This is a bad idea. A very bad idea, Dan.' I learned that I should remove myself from Dan's grip while his attorney was distracting him.
"I also learned at that moment, during an unspoken conversation between my boss and I, that my boss was not there to look out for me; he was there to listen to any directive his boss, Dan Snyder, had given to him, at my cost. The next day I learned, when I told a senior coworker about Dan Snyder's sexual advance, that I should, quote, 'not repeat this story to anyone outside this office door.' That was when I also learned there was no one to go to about Dan Snyder's advance, no path to report the incident, so I learned to move on."
"As a Washington Redskins cheerleader, I learned a lot as well," Johnston went on to say. "In the last couple of years, I learned that Dan Snyder, via senior vice president, demanded my unedited, enlarged lingerie calendar photo be sent to his office. I learned that this demand was made urgently, because they knew that the graphic artist was getting ready to photoshop my personal areas before the edited proof went before all of the senior VPs and Dan Snyder for approval."
Thursday's roundtable on Capitol Hill was spurred on by a group of Democratic lawmakers in their ongoing effort to pressure the NFL into releasing the findings of Beth Wilkinson's investigation, which was reduced to an oral report after a nearly year-long investigation into the then-named Washington Football Team.
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