You shouldn’t be surprised
July 17, 2020
UPDATED 11:35 a.m.
by Steve Thomas
The much anticipated Washington Post expose on the Redskins front office, written by Will Hobson, dropped Thursday afternoon (click here to read; it’s behind their paywall), and it’s appalling. Not even the least bit surprising, mind you, but appalling. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend that you do so. The report alleges that 15 former female Redskins employees were sexually harassed by team employees and senior officials while employed by the team. One of the 15, Emily Applegate, went on the record, with the other 14 choosing to remain anonymous. Former “voice of the Redskins” and Senior Vice President Larry Michael, former president of business operations Dennis Greene, former chief operating officer Mitch Gershman, former director of pro personnel Alex Santos, and former assistant director of pro personnel Richard Mann II were all directly accused of various forms of inappropriate sexual-related conduct against female employees dating as far back as 2006. The Athletic’s Rhiannon Walker and former Washington Times Redskins beat writer Nora Princiotti also went on the record to discuss inappropriate sexual behavior towards them by Santos. Applegate served in the team’s marketing department and worked directly with Gershman, who allegedly acted like a pig towards her.
Neither owner Dan Snyder nor former team president Bruce Allen were implicated in the Post’s report, although Applegate was quoted as stating, “I would assume Bruce [Allen] knew, because he sat 30 feet away from me . . . and saw me sobbing at my desk several times every week.” The report states that the female accusers “expressed skepticisim” that Snyder and Allen were unaware of the alleged behavior. The 15 women collectively painted a picture of a long-standing culture of inappropriate sexual conduct and advances towards female employees that pervaded throughout the entire organization, not just the individual accusers and those directly accused. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s horrific.
I’ll have much more to say about this, both in writing and on the show, but my initial big-picture takeaway from this piece is that the Washington Redskins have a long-standing, deep rooted toxic culture and work environment, and that it started at the top. This is not a series of isolated incidents; it’s a systemic problem that clearly infects the entire organization, and it’s Dan Snyder’s fault. Whether or not he actually knew about the specific incidents documented in the Washington Post’s report, he’s the leader and he allowed this absolutely abominable behavior to fester for many years. I can understand an isolated incident or two – it wouldn’t be acceptable or right, but I could see how one or two bad apples could pop up in any organization. However, almost any non-Enron organization would handle things the right way and appropriately discipline the offenders and stamp out the problem. As it turns out, the Redskins didn’t even have a viable reporting mechanism in place or even a real HR department, and didn’t encourage its employees to report behavior such as this. That’s shameful.
What Dan Snyder instead allowed – and in fact, if the allegations of his verbal abuse of his senior executives documented in the Post’s report, helped to perpetuate and foster – was for bad behavior to become the acceptable norm. That’s on Snyder. Everyone is responsible for their own actions, but I didn’t spent 20+ years as a commissioned officer in the U.S. military to let the senior person in charge of an organization off the hook for such a serious, long-standing, wide spread, and deep-rooted problem. He was the leader, his organization has a huge cultural problem that he was at least at some level responsible for creating, and he also did nothing to fix it. Nobody would claim that the on-the-field product under Snyder has been anything but some variant of primarily terrible to mediocre during his tenure (with the exception of a couple Joe Gibbs II years), and what we know now is what we all suspected: Redskins Park was as screwed up as the team itself. I’ve always said, since the earliest days of The Hog Sty, that becoming a consistent winning sports franchise starts at the top. Dan Snyder has proven that he’s flat-out incapable of running an effective business organization, either on or off the field.
I’d bet the house that the 15 women cited in the Washington Post’s piece aren’t the only ones who were sexually harassed and worse – these are just the tip of the iceberg who came forward. We’ve heard for years about how hard it is for women to break into the world of men’s professional sports. For my part, I never really fully understood just how bad the problem really was until reading this report. The NFL is a very macho, male-centric environment, but all the same, women have every right, both legally and morally, to work in sports without having to be subjected to this kind of garbage. The NFL as a whole, and certainly the Redskins in particular, both need to make dramatic changes to correct this problem. It’s almost unbelievable to me to think that a senior front office executive in any business would actually have the unmitigated gall to think it’s acceptable to pinch a female reporter on the hip and to continually speak inappropriately to another. It’s even worse that the team claimed to discipline him but refused to disclose what was actually done, if anything, until he was finally fired under duress this week.
The sad fact is that Dan Snyder could very well escape this, even though he’s most at fault and clearly incapable of leading a professional organization. The Redskins hired a high-powered female litigator Thursday to investigate “team protocols”, so Snyder’s argument becomes, “I didn’t know about any of it; I fired my team president last year; I hired an expensive attorney to fix the problem; I have a new guy, Ron Rivera, in charge of the organization”. The NFL could very well buy that argument. Contractually, it’s tough for the league to formally force him to sell the team, although the league could remove him from power and install somebody else to represent the franchise as the designated owner to the league. Informally, what the other owners could do is what they did to Jerry Richardson of the Carolina Panthers when he was personally accused of sexual misconduct: put owner to owner pressure on him and tell him that the gig is up and it’s time to sell. The problem here is that because Snyder was not personally accused of misconduct and was not alleged to have known about the problems, he might just have enough plausible deniability to survive without getting forced out as long as he takes steps to get in front of it. I think it’s more likely than not that Snyder survives.
So, in summary: disgusting, grossly inappropriate, but utterly unsurprising given the stories we’ve heard over the years. We, The Hog Sty, have heard many allegations of various terrible behaviors coming out of Redskins Park, so frankly I actually expected this report to be worse. I wish something would change to the point that the Redskins would become a model franchise, but that’s just not going to happen as long as the team owner is totally incapable of real leadership.
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UPDATE:
The Redskins issued the following statement on this matter from Dan Snyder:
The behavior described in yesterday’s Washington Post article has no place in our franchise or society.
This story has strengthened my commitment to setting a new culture and standard for our team, a process that began with the hiring of Coach Rivera earlier this year.
Beth Wilkinson and her firm are empowered to do a full, unbiased investigation and make any and all requisite recommendations. Upon completion of her work, we will institute new policies and procedures and strengthen our human resources infrastructure to not only avoid these issues in the future but most importantly create a team culture that is respectful and inclusive of all.