Sex assault claims dark twist to Brown’s unhinged charade
Antonio Brown made it seem like he got what he wanted in his football career. Someone was filming him as the Oakland Raiders cut him loose, and Brown ran out into the backyard that had been featured in a previous video in which he wiretapped his coach, and this time the wide receiver flapped his arms and bellowed about how finally he was free. Both videos were posted to his YouTube channel, one chaotic day apart.
By the end of the day Brown was a New England Patriot, and maybe that was the plan. But likely not. It’s tempting to compare Brown’s unhinged behaviour to the NBA’s era of increased player empowerment. Jimmy Butler provided the modern NBA blueprint for how to forcibly hit the eject button. His campaign to get out of Minnesota escalated and escalated, and culminated the day he went to practice, refused to play with the starters, grabbed four third-string players, beat the starters over and over while yelling at the team’s general manager, and strutted out of the gym to sit down for an interview with Rachel Nichols of ESPN.
That was strategy, meticulously planned and executed. He was traded to Philadelphia a month later.
On the surface, Brown’s exit looked like Butler’s gambit. He pushed, and pushed, and pushed. Brown was a pain — cryogenically injured feet, an irrational preference for an outdated helmet — then added a heated confrontation with general manager Mike Mayock in which he threatened to fight him and called him a cracker. They worked it out: Brown apologized to his teammates, practised last Friday, and the team said he would play Monday night.
And then came the dreamlike twominute video, and this is where the line between deliberate troublemaking and an inability to help himself diverges. It could have been shot by Terrence Mal
ick on his day off. Brown in black and white, working out; Brown and his sons in his expansive backyard, playing; Brown working out in his pool; Brown in the empty Oakland Coliseum. Watch the trailer for Malick’s Tree of Life and it’s the same basic vibe of humanity amid the tremulousness of existence, or something.
And throughout, over strings from the score of the Oscarwinning film Moonlight, a recorded conversation with Raiders coach Jon Gruden played. He’s trying to help Brown; he says, “You know what? You’re not a villain. You’re just the most misunderstood f------ human being in my entire life that I’ve ever met.” He flatters Brown, asks him to just play football because he’s great, and Brown says, “I’m more than a football player, I’m a real person … This is my life. Ain’t no more games.”
As Brown says that he is pictured blissfully falling backwards in his pool, still in black and white.
If you release that video, even after getting permission from Gruden, you are firebombing a wooden bridge, or at least testing to see how flame-retardant it really is. And if you want to believe Brown did all this to get out of Oakland, you can. It implies that this wasn’t a pattern of self-destructive, even compulsive behaviour from someone in trouble; it also implies Brown was executing a strategy that would cost him approximately $20 million U.S. in guaranteed money.
That doesn’t seem to be the case. This seems like immolation. One source who was familiar with Brown’s thinking and was granted anonymity in order to speak freely about the situation confirms that as of Friday afternoon he intended to stay a Raider. And then Brown posted that wiretapping video, just as he livestreamed the Steelers locker room in the 2017 playoffs and provided bulletin-board material for the Patriots, who then pasted Pittsburgh. As the source said of the dreamlike video, “it served no purpose other than attention. Bad attention. He couldn’t stop himself.”
It wasn’t rational; it was compulsive.
All this was before it was revealed Brown was being accused of three counts of sexual assault in a federal lawsuit filed in Florida by his former trainer, Britney Taylor. It includes what are apparently emails from Brown bragging about at least one of the assaults, ejaculating on her back in 2017; Brown is also accused of raping Taylor in 2018.
It is not clear whether Taylor told anybody of the rape when it occurred; Brown’s legal team countered by painting the alleged victim as greedy and toxic, and at the very least echoes the language of victim blaming. None of the allegations have been tested in court, and ESPN reported Brown will countersue for civil extortion. Accusing the rich and famous of sexual assault is a fraught and difficult road, even in the age of MeToo. This is ugly, and will likely get worse.
You have to separate his football behaviour from the alleged crimes, obviously; one is established, one is an accusation, though the lawsuit does claim to include some contemporaneous evidence.
Whatever the outcome, Antonio Brown doesn’t seem to be a story of athlete empowerment as much as a story of compulsive self-destruction and potentially worse. Forcing his way out of Oakland seems more like wreckage that a stronger, smarter organization might have been able to contain; the sexual assault allegations may be much more. Maybe he will sail through all this, as some have; maybe New England will stand by their new acquisition; maybe talent, as it so often does in America, rules above all.
This feels tremulous, though. As the source said of the wide receiver, “he’s in a spiral, and it’s sad.” It’s all entertainment, until the music stops.