Report: Washington Football Team owner Daniel Snyder files $10M defamation suit

Washington Football Team owner Dan Snyder has filed a defamation lawsuit seeking $10 million.

The Washington Football Team is front and center in the news on a nonstop basis.

Team owner Daniel Snyder has filed a $10 million lawsuit in New Delhi and in federal court papers in California, Snyder said the news site, Media Entertainment Arts WorldWide, whose parent company is based in India, published stories that it knew were false and designed to malign him, some using information from anonymous posts on social news sites including Reddit, according to The New York Times.

The stories, which have since been removed from M.E.A. WorldWide’s website, asserted that Snyder was involved in sex trafficking and speculated that the team’s minority owners were “looking at bringing him down citing inappropriate and unchaste behavior as one of the major reasons,” according to parts of the story included in the complaint.

The suit comes on the same day Snyder’s team released its second-round pick in 2018, Derrius Guice, who was arrested on domestic-abuse charges.

As for the Snyder lawsuit, per The Times:

Snyder, who seeks $10 million in damages, wants to identify if, and by whom, M.E.A. WorldWide was paid to publish the articles, his lawyer, Rizwan A. Qureshi of the firm Reed Smith, said in a statement.

“While Mr. Snyder understands that truthful criticism about the Washington Football Team comes with the territory of owning the team, malicious criminal allegations cross the line. He intends to hold all of those responsible for this defamation accountable, and will donate any proceeds recovered in the lawsuit to charity.”

In a phone interview, Nirnay Chowdhary, a founder of MEA WorldWide, acknowledged “some sort of errors” were made in the stories about Snyder. “We are going to be launching an internal investigation,” he said.