Jon Gruden, previous coach of the Las Vegas Raiders, sues NFL and the commissioner Roger Goodell for allegedly leaking his emails that led to his resignation.
After the Raiders experienced their first loss to the Los Angeles Chargers, an email sent from Jon Gruden to Bruce Allen dating back to 2011 was released into the public. The emails contained a racist insult of then Executive Director of the National Football League Players Association, DeMaurice Smith.
The leaked emails became a domino effect of drama unfolding to the public. As more emails that were claimed as homophobic and sexist were presented. Shortly after, Raiders owner Mark Davis came out explaining that the recent events were “not what the Raiders stand for,” and that they were “reviewing it along with other materials provided by the NFL.”
Just days after drama of the leak amidst, on Oct. 11, Jon Gruden stepped down and resigned as head coach. With Rich Bisaccia, previous special teams coordinator for the Raiders, being named as interim head coach.
Hardly a month away from his job, Gruden and his lawyers are claiming that this was a motivated effort by the league to ruin his reputation.
A statement released by Adam Hosmer-Henner attorney for Gruden detailed the lawsuit,”The complaint alleges that the defendants selectively leaked Gruden's private correspondence to the Wall street Journal and New York times in order to harm Gruden’s reputation and force him out of his job.”
The statement later explains how the league specifically targeted Gruden by making his emails public compared to the NFL's Washington Football email investigation.
“There is no explanation or justification for why Gruden’s emails were the only ones made public out of the 650,000 emails collected in the NFL investigation of the Washington Football team” Henner later in the statement explained. Feeling as if the same level of scrutiny was unfair.
The issue on this lawsuit is that did the NFL hold these emails for months and dropped it right into the middle of the Raiders season? All after the Raiders seemed to perform extremely well for the beginning of the season.
This might be the beginning of a whole issue bubbling to surface in the NFL where it is perceived as the Raiders cannot go beyond a week without dragged in the middle of controversy.
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