Former NFL Team Employees Charge Harassment Investigation Results

When the owners of 32 NFL teams gathered at a Washington hotel on Tuesday 26th for their quarterly discussion of two US football league deals, two women who once worked for Washington Football Team added an unexpected item to the agenda.

Melanie Coburn, former cheerleader and marketing director, and Ana Nunez, who worked in sales, delivered a two-page letter to meeting participants in which they pleaded with the Working Group for Social Justice, a committee made up of five owners of NFL clubs, to release the results of a ten-month-long investigation into what they define as “the team’s sexist and misogynistic culture.”

In July, the NFL fined Washington $10 million (about R$56 million at current prices) after a year-long investigation into the runaway culture of sexual harassment perpetuated by club managers and executives under ownership by Daniel Snyder. The team will also be monitored by human resources consultants for two years.

But the league did not release the results of the investigation, led by Beth Wilkinson, a Washington lawyer, who was asked instead to present her report orally. Her presentation served as the basis for the league’s decision to punish the team.

Without a transparent account of the misconduct identified by the investigation, argued Coburn and Nunez and ten other signatories to the letter, it is impossible to know “whether the corrective actions taken by the working group are sufficient to resolve the underlying problems that we, and others. people like us reported to Wilkinson.”

Their call for the league to publicly release the investigation’s findings came after The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal published in early October internal emails written and received by Bruce Allen, former chairman of the Washington Football Team. The messages were full of racist, homophobic and misogynist language, and contained topless photos of the team’s cheerleaders.

Allen was fired in December 2019. The publication of his message exchange with Jon Gruden, until recently Las Vegas Raider coach, led to his resignation on October 11th.

Since then, women’s rights advocates, NFL players and, last week, two US federal lawmakers have demanded that the league release the findings and 650,000 email messages collected as part of the inquiry.

Jeff Miller, an NFL spokesman, declined to comment when asked whether the team owners had read the letter. The league said it did not release its findings in order to protect the identities of some former Washington employees.

“When you promise to protect someone’s anonymity,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said on Tuesday, “you have to keep that promise.”

About 50 former employees told The Washington Post and other media outlets about widespread sexual harassment and intimidation. But many others, who refuse to talk to the media, still want the report to be released, according to Coburn and Nunez.

“There are a lot of ex-employees who continue to feel intimidated and scared, they haven’t come forward yet. We want to make sure their stories are heard,” said Coburn, who was Washington Football Team’s cheerleader and marketing director for 14 years, before leave the organization in 2011. “When I saw that the report was going to be oral, the whole thing started to look fake to me.”

Although the Washington Football Team situation was not on the agenda of the owners’ meeting, some of them discussed it informally.

Arriving at the meeting on Tuesday, Woody Johnson, owner of the New York Jets, repeatedly refused to discuss the matter, referring any questions to league leadership.

The release of the emails “rekindled the fire” of the campaign to release the report, Coburn said. “It served to demonstrate that videos and photos [das cheerleaders] circulated far more in the NFL than we could have imagined.”

“We want the public to know the truth,” she concluded.