After days of wild speculation, the Washington Post published its bombshell report on the Washington NFL team’s toxic culture. The scope of the story didn’t match the scope of the internet’s wild conspiracy theories. There was no ref bribing or reporters catphishing team employees for scoops.
No, it was far more sinister than that.
Fifteen women who worked for the team said they were sexually harassed and verbally abused by several team employees, including former director of pro personnel Alex Santos and play-by-play man/senior vice president of content Larry Michael. The story features horrifying accounts from a number of former employees and reporters who covered the team.
Via The Washington Post:
“The allegations raised by [former employee Emily] Applegate and others — running from 2006 to 2019 — span most of Snyder’s tenure as owner and fall into two categories: unwelcome overtures or comments of a sexual nature, and exhortations to wear revealing clothing and flirt with clients to close sales deals.”
If you’ve been listening to women, this type of environment being tolerated by a professional sports organization should not come as a surprise. That this particular organization — and surely it’s not the only one — was tolerating it should not come as a surprise to anyone.
Snyder showed what little regard he had for women when he signed Reuben Foster just days after the linebacker’s second domestic violence arrest. And that came just months after a New York Times report alleged team execs required cheerleaders to pose topless during photoshoots attended by FedEx Field suite owners. The cheerleaders were also told to accompany employees of sponsors on trips to nightclubs.
Via The New York Times:
Their participation did not involve sex, the cheerleaders said, but they felt as if the arrangement amounted to “pimping us out.” What bothered them was their team director’s demand that they go as sex symbols to please male sponsors, which they did not believe should be a part of their job.
Unlike former Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, who was forced to sell his team in 2018, Snyder was not directly implicated in any of this behavior, but there’s no way he was completely oblivious to the toxicity that pervaded his franchise. And if he was oblivious to it, that might actually be worse. As Roger Goodell told the Saints before doling out punishment for Bountygate, “Ignorance is not an excuse.”
Ignorance clearly isn’t the problem in Washington. It’s apathy. The same apathy left Snyder unaffected by the Native American groups that were imploring him to change the team’s racist name for decades (he only acquiesced when sponsors threaten to hurt his bottom line.)
Even if Snyder had been unaware of this pattern of abusive behavior, you’d think the 2018 New York Times story would have set off some alarm bells and sparked some sort of internal investigation — the kind of internal investigation the team has now launched after they were notified by the Post of the allegations featured in the story published Thursday. But nope. Snyder turned a blind eye to it all, and, therefore, allowed it to persist.
Complain about “cancel culture” all you want. The fact is, Daniel Snyder has proven again and again that he’s not someone the league should want owning one of its teams. He’s created the opposite of the culture the league should be trying to cultivate and the other owners have a right to protect the league.
Now the focus shifts to the NFL and Goodell, who constantly tries to convince us this league cares about women and people of color. On multiple occasions, this owner has shown us he does not care about either. That shouldn’t be tolerated and Snyder should be forced out, as many NFL fans are now calling for.
Will Goodell take this opportunity to prove his words weren’t hollow? If he doesn’t, it’s going to be hard to take him, or this league, seriously on any of these matters going forward. We already expect them to get so many things wrong — remember when they acknowledged their mistake in how they treated protesting players without even mentioning Colin Kaepernick? — but this appears to be a real chance to make a significant and lasting change.
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