WASHINGTON — The legal professional normal for the District of Columbia says his workplace is submitting a civil shopper safety lawsuit in opposition to the Washington Commanders, proprietor Dan Snyder, the NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell.
Lawyer Normal Karl Racine introduced the civil criticism for colluding to deceive district residents at a information convention Thursday.
Racine stated the workforce and league violated D.C. customers’ rights based mostly on what they knew in regards to the group’s office misconduct, alleging Snyder lied about his data of the state of affairs.
4 posters flanked Racine throughout his announcement, outlining among the historical past of the workforce’s rebranding efforts that included references to D.C. and its flag and the historical past of the NFL’s investigation into the group’s office tradition.
“Dan Snyder assured followers that he would absolutely cooperate with the investigation and the outcomes might be trusted,” one of many posters learn. “That was a lie: He repeatedly tried to intervene, and the followers couldn’t belief outcomes that have been by no means made public. As a result of Snyder had a veto.”
The findings of Beth Wilkinson’s investigation weren’t launched in July 2021, when the league fined the workforce $10 million for having a poisonous office tradition. The ultimate poster learn: “Followers’ outrage intensified when it grew to become clear that Snyder lied to them: There can be no transparency and no reckoning. That impacted shopper spending selections.”
Legal professionals Lisa Banks and Debra Katz, who characterize greater than 40 former workforce workers, stated the civil criticism “is additional proof of what we have lengthy recognized: that each the Commanders and the NFL have engaged in deception and lies designed to hide the workforce’s many years of sexual harassment and abuse, which has impacted not solely the victims of that abuse, but in addition customers within the District of Columbia.”
They added, “The submitting of this criticism additionally marks an essential step in validating the experiences of the courageous men and women who got here ahead and in attaining, for the primary time, a stage of transparency into the scope of the misconduct.”
The legal professional normal calling a information convention caught the Commanders unexpectedly, in response to a press release from a spokesperson Wednesday that stated they discovered about it on social media.
“The Commanders have absolutely cooperated with the AG’s investigation for almost a yr,” the spokesperson stated. “As just lately as Monday, a lawyer for the workforce met with the AG who didn’t counsel at the moment that he supposed to take any motion and, in actual fact, revealed elementary misunderstandings of the underlying info.”
The workforce is being investigated on a number of fronts, together with by the attorneys normal of D.C. and Virginia, Congress and the league. NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy final week stated former U.S. Lawyer Mary Jo White’s assessment on behalf of the league is ongoing and there’s no timetable for when it is going to be accomplished.
The Snyders introduced final week they employed Financial institution of America Securities to look into promoting half or all the workforce. A workforce spokesperson stated they have been “exploring all choices” regarding the group that Forbes values at $5.6 billion.
