The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Coach’s downfall
Investigations into the Washington Football Team resulted in Jon Gruden resigning from the Raiders.
Former Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden is out of a job in the aftermath of an investigation that originally had nothing to do with him. But now he is collateral damage in a tangled case that had focused on the conduct of Daniel Snyder, the contentious owner of the Washington Football Team, and his feud with investors in the team.
Snyder has emerged with firmer control of Washington than before even after Roger Goodell, the league’s commissioner, concluded that the workplace environment at the team was “highly unprofessional” and a place of bullying, intimidation and fear. The team was fined $10 million.
A scorched-earth dispute has played out over the last year, with damning information and accusations of wrongdoing weaponized by those involved. Gruden’s high-profile football career, which made him a wealthy man and an avatar of the sport itself, meant that his misdeeds became leverage in a fight that wasn’t even directly about him.
It begins in Washington
Snyder and the Washington Football Team have long been mired in controversy, whether for the previous team name that was eventually dropped because it was a slur toward Native Americans or the organization’s mistreatment of its cheerleaders. But the situation escalated last summer when The Washington Post published a report in which two dozen current and former employees described an atmosphere of pervasive sexual harassment, bullying and abuse at work. At least two executives were fired, others were pushed out, and the team commissioned an outside investigation by the law firm Wilkinson Walsh that was soon taken over by the NFL itself.
Parallel to and often intersecting with the workplace misconduct investigation was a bitter internecine quarrel among Snyder and three of the team’s minority owners, Frederick W. Smith (father of Falcons coach Arthur Smith), Dwight Schar and Robert Rothman, who collectively owned 40% of the franchise. Attempts by the three minority owners to sell their shares devolved into acrimony with Snyder, and the NFL appointed an arbitrator to resolve the matter privately.
Their dispute did not stay private for long.
Snyder soon sued an obscure online media company in India, accusing it of taking money in exchange for publishing defamatory rumors about him. In lawsuit filings, Snyder also accused a representative trying to help the minority owners sell their shares of wrongly telling a potential investor that Snyder would soon be forced to sell because of negative information spilling out into public.
In effect, Snyder accused the men who had co-owned the team with him since 2003 of leaking negative information to The Washington Post and the Indian media company to attempt to force him to sell his stake in the team, too.
Selling minority stakes in football teams valued at billions of dollars in full can be quite difficult, and if Snyder were forced to sell his stake in the team, too, the minority owners could presumably sell more easily and at a higher price.
Workplace investigation
Throughout the end of 2020 and into 2021, both the investigation into Washington’s workplace culture and the NFL’s mediation of the ownership dispute proceeded more quietly. In March, the NFL tentatively approved an agreement in which Snyder would be allowed to take on more debt than the league traditionally allows in order to buy out his three partners. It was a sign that the outside investigation, while not yet complete, would largely exonerate Snyder personally.
Three months later, in July, that was exactly what happened. The NFL finally resolved the yearlong investigation. The Washington Football Team was ordered to pay a $10 million fine and reimburse the cost of the investigation, and Snyder said he would cede day-to-day control of the team to a new co-chief executive, his wife, Tanya Snyder, through at least October. The team’s human resources department was ordered to be monitored for the next two years.
But the investigation’s findings were not made public, and nothing was said about allegations about Snyder’s behavior toward female employees. Not only did the NFL not release a thorough report, it did not even ask for one. Instead, Beth Wilkinson, the lead outside investigator, briefed the NFL verbally on her findings.
“We felt it was best due to the sensitivity of the allegations and the requests for confidentiality,” Lisa Friel, the NFL executive in charge of investigations, told reporters.
Bruce Allen’s role
Part of the investigation, however, involved the review of the emails sent and received by Bruce Allen, the team’s longtime general manager and president, and a close confidant of Snyder, until Allen was fired in 2019. The review of Allen’s inbox and outbox is what ultimately led to Gruden’s resignation and showed that Allen participated in inappropriate and offensive conversations, including the sharing of pornographic images.
Allen was a senior executive with the Raiders during Gruden’s first stint as the head coach there, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and both eventually went to work for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where they won a Super Bowl in the 2002-03 season. Both left the team in 2008. Gruden went on to work for ESPN as a color analyst for “Monday Night Football,” and Allen was eventually hired by Washington. As general manager there, Allen hired Gruden’s brother, Jay Gruden, who coached the team from 2014 to 2019.
Email string
Though Jon Gruden and Allen ceased being co-workers in 2008, they regularly chatted about league matters by email. Gruden used a private email address while Allen used his official Washington Football Team account. Wilkinson’s investigation collected those emails, as well as hundreds of thousands of others, which were analyzed and discussed by the league, but not noted in any report.
Since 2014, the NFL has been embroiled, nearly constantly, in misconduct scandals that
necessitated external investigations. Most of them have been limited to accusations against players and tests of the league’s authority to punish their misconduct. One of the few that threatened to drag the league office and team owners into the harsh spotlight, Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid’s accusations that they were blackballed from the league, was settled before that could happen.
A number of questions remain unanswered about Washington’s workplace and what the NFL and the Raiders knew about Gruden’s emails and how those organizations handled them. But it seems fitting that so far the biggest public revelations have centered on Gruden, not Snyder or anyone directly associated with the Washington Football Team.
In an investigation of workplace harassment, the extent of the harassment is still unknown publicly.
NEW YORK — For a brief moment this summer, it seemed like small businesses might be getting a break from the relentless onslaught of the pandemic. More Americans, many of them vaccinated, flocked to restaurants and stores without needing to mask up or socially distance.
But then came a surge in cases due to the delta variant, a push for vaccine mandates and a reluctant return to more COVID-19 precautions. Now, small business owners are left trying to strike a balance between staying safe and getting back to being fully open.
Navigating ever-changing coronavirus reality comes with a number of risks, from financial hardship to offending customers to straining workers. Those challenges could intensify as winter approaches and outdoor alternatives become limited. Still, small business owners say the whiplash is worth it to keep customers and employees as safe as possible.
“Just weeks ago, small business owners hoped that a return to normalcy would help jump start our recovery,” said Jessica John
son-Cope, chair of Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Voices National Leadership Council and owner of a small business herself, Johnson Security Bureau in New York.
New York City ordered a vaccine mandate for customers in August. For Dan Rowe, CEO of Fransmart, which runs the Brooklyn Dumpling Shop, the mandate has been a financial burden, and a headache. Brooklyn Dumpling Shop first opened in May and has six staffers. It’s pandemic-friendly format is contactless and automated.
“It was engineered to be a restaurant with less employees,” Rowe said. Glass separates the kitchen and staff from customers, who order food from an app. When the kitchen is finished making the food, it’s placed an automat-style window, so workers don’t come into contact with customers.
“We’ve engineered this great low labor restaurant, and the government is making us go backward,” he said.
Rowe had to hire another staffer to check vaccine cards at the door, increasing his overhead. His complaint is that retail stores and groceries with prepared foods like Whole Foods don’t face the same restrictions.
“It’s not fair what’s going on and it’s not practical,” he said.
The changing rules can cause customer confusion — and even some resentment.
Suzanne Lucey has owned Page 158 Books bookstore in Wake Forest, N.C., for six years. When the pandemic began, the store was closed for three months. Page 158 Books reopened last July, and gradually increased store capacity from 5 to 12, abiding by state guidelines. Capacity limits were lifted ahead of the holidays last year.
When case numbers started crawling up this summer, Lucey’s zip code became the third-highest in the state for COVID-19 cases. They have a sign in the window that says a mask is required inside the store, but without state or city rules to back them up, they’re not enforcing it.
Lucey said only about one or two people a month disregard the rule.
“It’s hard. You don’t want to turn people away. But I want my staff to feel secure,” Lucey said, especially since two of her staff have medical conditions that make them more vulnerable. “I don’t want my staff to feel like they have to be combative. So that’s how we’re handling it. Most people are pretty respectful.”
Allison Glasgow, director of operations for McNally Jackson bookstores in New
York, echoed Lucey’s sentiment.
Her stores follow state and city rules for restrictions. One store has a cafe, which must follow the New York City mandate for customers being vaccinated. The bookstores also require vaccination proof at events. Otherwise, masks are optional, though recommended, if customers and staff are vaccinated.
“You can seem antagonistic when you’re trying to monitor people’s vaccination status,” she said. “It’s not ‘Hey, welcome in!’ which is what you have always wanted to do — it’s a bit of a roadblock there.”
Although safety is the priority for everyone, the changes can be draining for owners and staff alike.
Jennifer Williams, founder and CEO of closet organization company the Saint Louis Closet Co., said the company scrambled at first to implement a COVID-19 plan, including masking and increased sanitization.
“We don’t have the option to ‘work from home.’ Our business happens in our manufacturing plant and in our client’s homes, so we had to adjust quickly at the onset of the pandemic with COVID precautions,” she said.
She nixed the mask requirement July 1, after her staff was fully vaccinated, COVID-19 cases were declining and the CDC recommendations changed. But that was short-lived.
In early August, Missouri was one of the top three states of coronavirus cases. Williams re-implemented the mask mandate.
Williams’ staffers can spend up to eight hours a day in a mask installing closet organizing systems in a customer’s home. “The mental drain on employees has been extreme,” Williams said.
Jessica Benhaim, owner of Lumos Yoga & Barre, an independent fitness studio in Philadelphia, gradually increased size limits of classes from late spring into the summer, but capped them at 12, short of pre-pandemic levels of 18 students for yoga and 14 for barre.
Even though the city has lifted capacity restrictions, she’s keeping it capped in case restrictions come back. She lifted mask requirements for vaccinated students on June 15 but reinstated them when Philadelphia implemented a mask mandate in mid-August. Vaccinated students can remove their masks when they reach their mats.
“The constant adjustments over the last 18 months have been draining,” Benhaim said. “More than anything, it’s been stressful balancing making adjustments with trying to keep a sense of normalcy for my staff and clients.”