The Ringer NFL Show - Breaking Down the Deshaun Watson Report

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

Nora and Lindsay get together to share their reactions to the news of Judge Robinson's ruling in the Deshaun Watson case that led to the star quarterback's six-game suspension by the NFL. They examine all the aspects of the decision, and discuss the ramifications of it on the league going forward. Hosts: Nora Princiotti and Lindsay Jones Production Supervision: Arjuna Ramgopal and Conor Nevins Associate Producer: Chris Sutton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey there, it's Ariah Hawani, one-third of the fastest growing show in combat sports. I'm Chuck Mindenholm. And I'm Preeti Carroll, and together we are three-pack. Join us on the Spotify Live app after every UFC pay-per-view and become a part of the best community in mixed martial arts. Or, if you can't make it, check out the Ringer MMA show podcast exclusively on Spotify. See you then. Love you. Welcome to The Ringer NFL show. I'm Nora Prince-Iadi.

Before we get started, we want to note that this episode contains descriptions of sexual violence that some listeners might find disturbing. There are new developments in the case of Brown's quarterback Deshawn Watson, which will be the topic of our show. We spoke earlier Monday, just as Judge Sue L. Robinson issued her recommendation that Watson be suspended for six games at the start of the 2022 season. A couple hours later, Robinson's full decision, with her interpretation of the arguments made by both sides and the reasoning informing her recommendation became available. It's a 16-page document in which Robinson agrees with the NFL on essentially everything, including that Watson engaged in, quote, predatory and, quote, egregious behavior and committed

sexual assault as defined by the NFL's personal conduct policy, but rejected their recommended punishment, which was for an indefinite suspension of at least a year. So to comb through the report and its implications, I am joined by my colleague Lindsay Jones. Hi, Lindsay. Thank you for joining us. Hello. I am glad to be back as we kind of go all the way. way through this document and some of the bigger implications of what this means because we know a lot more now than we did in the media and aftermath when we kind of just knew that it was going to be six games and there were a lot of questions. I still think there are a lot of questions, but we have a lot more understanding of how we at least got here. Yeah. So walk me through when you read all 16 pages of Judge Robinson's report this morning, what was going through your head? What were some of your immediate takeaways? Yeah. I mean, I think you hit on. kind of the biggest takeaway was that in essence, she agreed with basically everything that the NFL presented. But we did get a more fuller understanding of what exactly it was that the NFL brought

to that hearing. Those of us who've been kind of covering this case and these cases for, you know, a year and a half, nearly two years, it seems at this point, you know, we kind of know the details of these 24 civil cases that have been filed. We've all followed Jenny Vrentis's reporting at Sports Illustrated in the New York Times very closely where there have been additional accounts, corroborating accounts. But what I think was important when we were, you know, kind of realizing why this was a six-game suspension was understanding what exactly the NFL brought forward. And that was the accounts of four women. The NFL said it spoke to 12 of the women who had filed lawsuits against Deshaun Watson. They spoke with four of them. They were prepared to bring five of

them in front of Judge Robinson, ultimately only presented four of those cases. So what she was looking at was not necessarily the entire catalog of work that we have been following and reading all along. So, you know, I think that was part of it. And then the other, I think just the big takeaway here is that she found that they did their job in proving their cases, that they met the birth were able to meet the burden of proof. It's a different standard than the criminal standard. Basically, it had to be more likely than not. More likely than not language, which you may remember from deflating. The good old Tom Brady standard. And, you know, she defined that she agreed that the behavior that Deshaun

Watson exhibited during these massage sessions equated to sexual assault. She also found and determined that he knew or at least should have known that his behavior was wrong and inappropriate and continued to do it anyways. And that also the behavior, you know, damaged the shield for lack of a better term, you know, the damage the credibility and the integrity of the NFL by the power dynamic at play here. And that's something that I've come back to a lot over the course of, you know, the last year and a half, really, is that Deshawn Watson was using his stature as a very famous and powerful NFL player to recruit women for massages and ultimately put them in very uncomfortable and unwanted sexual experiences, maybe for lack of a better term here.

So those were my big takeaways. And I guess the question then is how do you reach both of those conclusions, that you agree with everything that the NFL was arguing in terms of the behavior and fitting all of the criteria for violations of the personal conduct policy, but don't agree with the actual punishment recommendation and going from 17 games plus to six games. That's my big question. So I think there are two prongs to that, and both of them are really important, and we should get to them in just a second. But you made a really important point about evidence there that I want to underline, which was that even though Sue Robinson only looked at evidence regarding

for women, and that was via the NFL's investigators. She found those investigators totally credible, and she agreed with the NFL and believed the league to have proven it more likely than not, which was the burden of proof, that Watson violated the personal conduct policy in all three ways that the NFL accused him of doing, which were engaging in sexual assault, engaging in conduct that poses a genuine danger to the safety and well-being of another person, and engaging in conduct that undermines or puts at risk, the integrity of the NFL. Because I think there's been this, and I wanted to underline that, because I think there's been this question of what does it mean that she only looked at four when we know the numbers that we've read and reported in this case to be so much greater than that?

And while that is, I think it's an interesting and valid question with regards to just how the NFL went about this, we should understand that. in her decision, she had no evidentiary issue here. She felt that they met the burden of proof in every case that they brought. So even though it's interesting, and I wonder kind of what the process and what the reasoning was, why those four were the four and why they didn't choose to try to bring more numbers to this case, it didn't result in anything that, you know, diminished a suspension that might have been greater otherwise, at least in terms of of the NFL, what the NFL said that Watson did. But Lindsay, you asked that question about kind of where the disconnect is between Sue Robinson saying,

yes, I agree with everything that the NFL says in terms of what Deshawn Watson did. And I agree that it's a violation of the personal conduct policy. And I think the first place, there's kind of two places where we see the disconnect. and the first has to do with her reliance on precedent. Can you tell me a little bit about how she seemed pretty concerned with what various precedents of suspensions and how the NFL has dealt out discipline in the past was? Yeah, so I think she looked at the personal conduct policy as it has existed since 2014, which was post-ray Rice, which is when the league, you know, namely,

Roger Goodell, they overhauled the personal conduct policy and what it meant to hold players accountable for their off-field behavior. I think before that, the NFL was very deferential to law enforcement, and it failed them when, most specifically in the Ray Rice case, when Roger Goodell suspended Ray Rice for two games, then we, Ray Rice entered a pretrial diversion program, so he was never actually charged with anything. So what this led to was that the NFL could conduct its own investigations, and they put in a six-game baseline suspension for violations of the personal conduct policy that fell under this umbrella that involved gendered violence, domestic violence, sexual assault, crimes involving weapons, all of these sorts of things.

And what Judge Robinson seemed to have found was that in almost every other case of gendered violence, and she used that word in her ruling, was that it was six games or less except for a few other cases where there were multiple instances or other aggravating circumstances. And she didn't seem to find the aggravating circumstances in this case to be worth adding additional games. So that was really, I think, where the precedent came from. It wasn't so much the precedent that we talked about on our first podcast about what sort of precedent they might be setting in terms of the appeals process and what this means for discipline moving forward. It was looking much more backwards at, you know, James Winston. I will say, though, this is independent of what her ruling states, and I don't want to discount the legal findings and the work that she and her team did.

But I've done a lot of reporting into this. I've spent a lot of time going into the NFL's personal conduct policy over the course of years, dating all the way back to 2014. And a couple of years ago, I did a really, really deep research project when I was at the U.S. into what the personal conduct policy has looked like since 2014 and how many players were actually punished up to that six-game standard. And there were examples of it. There were players who did reach that six-game threshold. But it was not the majority of them. And it has not been the majority of them even since 2019 and then into the new personal conduct or the new CBA in 2020. In reality, what happens is that when players are under suspicion, I don't

even want to say arrested, but oftentimes it is arrested on suspicion of domestic violence or sexual assault or any sort of these cases, they're almost always just cut. We'd never hear from them again. They're never actually officially punished by the NFL. Right. It's these very rare cases where it is a player of Deshaun Watson's stature or James Winston's. There's a couple of Ezekiel Elliott. There's a couple of examples where it just doesn't fit that pattern. There's a lot of other examples of players who were not actually punished. There was an investigation and nothing happened. Tyreek Hill and the child abuse allegations. Antonio Brown and all of the stuff that went on with him and his former personal trainer who had accused him of sexual and misconduct, no suspension involved

there for that exact issue. He was suspended, but it was not because of the civil suit that was filed and the sexual assault allegations there. So I will push back a little bit. on her finding that this is what the precedent was so that she could not go beyond it because I don't think the precedent that she's referring to as as strong as maybe it was indicated in that document. Well, and she does not seem to be a huge fan

of the personal conduct policy. Yes, that was clear. Or it's applications. She claims in the report that the NFL has defined certain prohibited conduct, including their definition of sexual assault that they use in Watson's, case post hoc. She thinks the league is overly responsive to public outcry. That's a quote from the,

or just public outcry is a phrase that she uses in the decision. She starts the decision essentially criticizing the lack of specificity in the personal conduct policy and in the CBA. She generally seems to think that a lot of this is pretty capricious and has been for a while. And she seems inclined here to try to assign some order to what she views as a disordered system. Now, that is her right. And to me at least, it makes some sense that someone in her position, you know, a former federal judge, someone who's been jointly appointed to do this, is concerned with precedent in that way. and I think a lot of us would agree with the history of league discipline being pretty random. Yeah.

And charges of it being a little capricious at times would be fair. And so to me, her reaction of sort of chiding the NFL for its history of that and saying, I have to do this in a way that follows some established order. and I have to try to make sense of that, even though you haven't made that easy. I sort of understand that impulse, even though the result in this, given the specific case, is very frustrating. But I do think what that does is puts it in Goodell's court to essentially say, yeah, we have this new process because we know we've made mistakes in the past and we know it hasn't gone

well for us in the past and we're attempting to correct that, but holding ourselves hostage to those mistakes of the past isn't going to do anything positive to that end. And I'm curious to see if there is an appeal. The league has not said whether or not they will appeal. They're considering it. I'm curious to see if that is at all part of that, if it does indeed occur, but we still have a lot to see in terms of how they go there. What has struck you about the league's reaction just to this initial report from Sue Robinson? Yeah, they didn't seem to be particularly swayed at all by the NFL PA's kind of preemptive shot in statement, and even the statement that the Cleveland Browns subsequently put out on Monday afternoon saying that they would

agree with this and that the process has been fair. The NFL did say that they agreed that the process was fair and both, that's the one thing that both sides agreed to. But the NFL did not seem particularly eager to just do what the NFLPA did and say, yes, we'll just abide by this. And they said that they were going to consider an appeal. And the fact that they were kind of like vindicated in all aspects of what they were asking for, except for the actual result, makes me a little bit more inclined than I was maybe 12 hours ago to believe that they would pursue. some sort of an appeal to get this a little bit more online with what they were asking for, even though it would start, as we talked about this morning, or on Monday morning, would probably

start somewhat of a war with the union. Right. And we'll be waiting to see what happens there. I want us to talk a little bit, Lindsay, about what ended up being kind of the thornyest part of the decision for me. And you mentioned that revision of the personal conduct policy that happened in response to the Ray Rice scandal, which was to enact the minimum six game suspension without pay for violations that involved assault or battery, domestic violence, dating violence, child abuse, and other forms of family violence, or sexual assault. But the actual language of the revision is sexual assault involving physical force or committed against someone incapable of giving consent. And we should note, as you did earlier, that

that revision has not exactly been applied perfectly or consistently throughout its existence, but Judge Robinson did work off that bit of text, it seems, and she wrote that it is undisputed that Mr. Watson's conduct does not fall into the category of violent conduct that would require a six-game suspension. So she considered it egregious, she considered it predatory, but she also categorized it as nonviolent, which was one of the things that kind of forced her, at least by her reasoning, to funnel the suspension length into this category of players who did not rise to that level or were not suspended in a way that that rose to that level of warranting the minimum six game suspension. And the issue of

violent versus nonviolent conduct ended up, I think, being sort of the most complicated thing here. And I want to hear what you think about this. But if you'll let me, I want to just read from the decision. Because she wrote, I am bound by standards of fairness and consistency of treatment among players similarly situated. Which, by the way, is another piece of language that comes from the deflategate decision, which I'm not saying to make another deflategate joke, could end up being, you know, if we somehow wind up in federal court here, those things do matter. So it's worth noting. The NFL argues that consistency is not possible because there are no similarly situated players. By ignoring past decisions because none involve, quote, similar conduct, however, the NFL is not just equating violent conduct with nonviolent conduct, but has elevated the importance

of the latter without any substantial evidence to support its position. While it may be entirely appropriate to more severely disciplined players for nonviolent sexual conduct, I do not believe it is appropriate to do so without notice of the extraordinary change this position pretends for the NFL and its players. So, Lindsay, can you tell me what you think about this distinction that Judge Robinson is creating between violent conduct and nonviolent conduct and sort of funneling Watson into one half of the binary there? Yeah, I mean, I guess where I come down on this or my initial thought on this is like who is who draws that line of what is violent and what is not violent because for the the four women whose cases were presented to her and to the 23 others

who either filed a civil lawsuit pursued criminal or pursued criminal charges in Texas their definition of what violence feels like might be very different than what is somehow written kind of on this page where it doesn't meet some sort of textbook definition of forcible rape. But I think, you know, I hope there are women listening to our podcast right now. I've heard from a lot of women. I see you in my mentions. I've heard from you over the course of a year and a half. And I think the way that women tend to have reacted to what they have read, what they have heard from these women is different than maybe what was written in that decision.

and, you know, who gets to decide what violent, you know, conduct is. So that was what was really, I think, concerning for me is now there is some sort of precedent that, you know, masturbating and ejaculating on a woman against her will or forcible touching, those things don't rise to that sort of level. And, you know, that's been troubling to me. And one of the other things, and this probably is deviating from your request. and I apologize, but one of the things that has also, I think, just bothered me through the duration of this is that I've never heard, you know, substantial things from other men in this league, from other players, that this is behavior that bothers them or that this is in any way concerning. You know, we've never heard any sort of remorse or contrition out of Watson's camp or any understanding that this was inappropriate behavior.

And while, you know, I think this decision does say this behavior was wrong and it does meet a standard of sexual assault by saying it's not violent crime and it doesn't rise to the level of, you know, other sorts of levels of sexual assault, I think it really is kind of dismissive of the women and their experiences and in doing so kind of survivors everywhere. And I think you see that in, you know, you mentioned just that, there are going to be a lot of people who might define sexual violence in a different way. And now I want to be clear here, laws vary, generally speaking, definitions of violent crimes and involve physical injury. The letter of the text of a law doesn't necessarily mean something is perfectly right. And the NFL is a cultural institution that has the power, though I don't, frankly think it uses it very well, but it does have the power to change certain things in the world and how they're perceived. So when the, I think just the dichotomy, the dividing just into

of violent conduct, nonviolent conduct, and anything that could have happened here has to fall into one category or another, it shows a little bit of this lack of understanding of something that I hope a lot of us have become more aware of and developed a greater understanding of, which is sexual coercion. Because power is such a big part of this story. And maybe reading between the lines when she writes, the NFL argues that consistency is not possible because there are no similarly situated players, maybe if I wanted to put on my rose colored glasses here, what I would hope for, like what I would dream for from the NFL. would be to say one of the elements that distinguishes this situation is that there's a clear pattern of someone with a lot of power and with a lot of resources at his disposal, seemingly using that position to force women into unwanted sexual situations. And that's a big deal.

And that can be a very big deal, even if it is not violent. in a way that leads to actual physical injury and that we have room to assign behavior like that, especially when it's patterned, and especially when it increasingly ties in the use of resources like a non-disclosure agreement from somebody with the Houston Texans. Or when we get into the additional gray areas of the mass, sums of money that this person is earning to play football being the same checks that get

turned around and are being applied to settlements. And that's, that is how the civil litigation system works. That's, that's fine. But my dream for them would be to approach how they handle this, whether that's a subsequent appeal, I think this is a light suspension. Frankly, I hope they will appeal it. And I would hope that as part of that, there's some understanding that this decision doesn't totally grasp the array of situations in which women or anyone can feel and can be sexually assaulted. And that just sort of splitting that into violent versus nonviolent and saying that this couldn't possibly rise to the level of cases that merited more than six games, you know, saying that it couldn't possibly do that because it wasn't

violent, that it doesn't present a nuanced understanding of what I hope we've all sort of come to understand about some of these situations. So I'm not saying I think that will happen, but in an effort to not just be totally cynical, that would be a dream outcome here in a situation where there are not a lot of them. I appreciate your attempts at being not cynical. This is the generation gap between you and me, Nora, because I don't think I have it in me anymore. Now, I'm not saying that I think it will happen.

I very much don't. But I want to at least, you know, leave people with some version. of what could be possible so that we don't just only assume that only bad can possibly come of it. So why even care? Because I do think that it's very easy to sort of get into the middle of the process and just think, well, they couldn't possibly do that because then it'll lead to a big fight with the union and what's going to come of that. It's just like, we need to remember that while we just walked through all of the things in this decision,

and there's a lot of nuance to it. There are some things that seem reasonable. There are some things that to my eye seem less reasonable. This is not over. And the person who has the basically sole ability to see where it goes is Roger Goodell. So in the interest of my not ranting anymore, is there anything else that you feel like we need to dive into

and make sure that we have a clear understanding of from this document? No, I think, you know, I think we covered it pretty well. in addition to the stuff that we did this morning. We've seen a few responses. You know, we talked about the NFL's response and the Browns. So I will exit my dream world here. And I think we've gone through a lot of the nuts and bolts of the report itself. But, Lindsay, is there anything more you think we should talk about in terms of just what's happened in the hours since this came came out?

We talked about the NFL's response. We talked about the Brown's response a little bit. bit, but I know some people in Cleveland have been at podiums and have been asked questions today, and Watson was at practice. Is there anything you think we need to know from all of that? Yeah, I mean, so we have yet to actually hear from Deshaun Watson. And it was something I talked about on the first pod that we recorded on Monday morning that, you know, I was watching to see how he was going to react, what he was going to say. We have yet to actually hear from him. But he was on the field fully with his teammates. We got to see reaction from some fans.

in Cleveland, I do not want to categorize what everybody was feeling and doing, but there, you know, is video going around on Twitter of like kind of a mob of fans swarming him after practice looking for autographs, Michelle Steele from ESPN, who was there, kind of was reporting that there were a lot of fans yelling things like, we got your back to Sean, and he's going to save us as the team took the field. And then we have heard a little bit from the Haslim's, the owners of that team, where they put out a statement in which they said that Deshaun. Sean Watson is remorseful. We have yet to actually see that or hear that from himself. And Kevin Stefanski, the head coach of the Browns, saying that he believed that Deshaun

Watson would be making better decisions moving forward. We did not mention, I guess the one other thing from that document that's related to the decisions that Deshaun Watson will be making moving forward is that he is no longer to get able to coordinate his own massages. They all have to happen in the team. So, you know, the Browns right now are saying, saying that they're supporting him and they're all behind him. And, you know, for good reason, they spent $230 million on this guy. It was a massive gamble. And at this point, the Browns got their quarterback. They're not going to have to spend a ton of money to pay him while he's suspended. And now he's going to get to play. And it's going to be really uncomfortable, I think,

for a lot of Browns fans moving forward. And it's something that we're going to be watching really closely. I think just exactly how all of that plays out and the dynamics, you know, on the ground in that locker room within the fan base as, you know, as he's suspended and then whenever it is that he comes back. Thank you so much, Lindsay, for your deafness in talking about this and just this story as it has unfolded. And I'm sure we will rely on your contributions more as it continues. This has been the Ringer NFL show. I'm Nora Princiotti. We will be back tomorrow. Thank you to Chris Sutton for production on this episode with additional production supervision by Connor Nebens and Arjuna Ram Gapal.