But Roger Goodell Always Made Money For His Partners

Willfully inept investigations and ludicrously arbitrary punishments, the Roger Goodell story:

There is no way of knowing if the NFL got this divorce file; I can only tell you that it is a public record, and was fairly simple to get. I got a copy; the NFL knew the Browns were going through a divorce; Josh Brown told reporters he was divorced back in August.

But even before that, there was very strong evidence of what happened, again provided by Molly Brown to law enforcement, that plenty of reporters got with relative ease. Here is how the documents the NFL apparently couldn’t get have been coming out, at least at my end: When the New York Daily News story broke, I sent in a public records request to the King County Sheriff’s Office. Since then, whenever they have had records to release, they have included me on the list of reporters who get them. Getting the law enforcement documents has mostly been as simple as hitting refresh on my laptop.

If reporters armed with little more than laptops can get detailed sheriff’s office records, why can’t the NFL? Why did it not only fail to get them but then blame Molly Brown herself, essentially re-victimizing her for the umpteenth time, for their failure to gather basic, public facts? These are perfectly fine questions; the only possible answers here are that the NFL didn’t want to know badly enough to not file basic public-records requests, or that it didn’t want to know badly enough not to read coverage from people who did. Add to that today’s SportsNet New York report by Ralph Vacchiano that the Giants (via the NFL) knew Molly Brown needed a new hotel room at the Pro Bowl in January because her then-husband was drunk and pounding on her door, and you come to a simple conclusion: The NFL knows what it would like to know, and continues to treat domestic violence as little more than a PR crisis.

This is no surprise if you look over previous NFL investigations. An NFL investigation of its Ray Rice investigation (yes, they did such a thing) found that the lead investigator assigned to Rice’s case was a dunce who at one point was just hitting refresh on a web browser. The NFL was so clueless it also interviewed Janay Rice with her husband in the room and then blamed her, not its own incompetence or public-relations-first mindset disguised as a player conduct policy, for doling out a lax punishment.

And yet, time after time, the NFL swore it had learned and that the next time would be different. In the Greg Hardy case, it did get documents—only after reaching sketchy agreements with local law enforcement to allow them see what the public could not. And within that veil of secrecy, with special access to records, they conducted a hearing in which Hardy’s lawyer was allowed to give his version of events, which included using a woman’s sex life against her and saying that what happened to her was just a slip and fall, with very little pushback from the NFL.

The information on offer in the new Brown documents was here all along. Yesterday’s release added color and detail to what was known months ago and reported weeks ago, here and elsewhere. That it took a man saying it was true for it to become a story is only affirmation that the word of women and children and law enforcement officers is not enough.

Well, at least Brown didn’t do anything really bad worthy of the NFL’s sustained attention, like smoke pot.

I didn’t think anything could top the ridiculous ineptitude of the NFL’s Ballghazi’s investigation, but this comes close.