The first Black woman to serve as this country’s Attorney General is trying to get Jim Trotter’s racial discrimination/retaliation lawsuit against the NFL dismissed — 21 months after she was hired to defend the league from Brian Flores’ class-action lawsuit against the NFL’s alleged racists hiring practices.
Loretta Lynch has made it her mission to show America that “Black-on-Black crime” occurs in courtrooms.
Here are a few standouts from the filing:
“The NFL denies Plaintiff’s allegations. The facts will show that there was nothing retaliatory or discriminatory about the decision not to renew Plaintiff’s contract. Even on its face, however, the Complaint is fatally deficient, and it should therefore be dismissed.”
“Plaintiff’s State and City Law Claims Should Be Dismissed. Plaintiff’s claims under the NYSHRL and NYCHRL should be dismissed for the separate reason that Plaintiff, a California resident working in California, cannot allege the requisite impact in New York City and New York State. (Compl. ¶ 18.) Threadbare allegations of travel to New York for work (id. ¶ 233) are insufficient at the pleading stage. See, e.g., Hoffman v. Parade Publs., 15 N.Y.3d 285, 291 (2010).”
“Discovery Should Be Stayed. Because the motion to dismiss is likely to at least narrow Plaintiff’s claims—and the scope of any discovery—the NFL also intends to seek a stay of discovery pending resolution of its motion.”
To make it plain, it’s a four-page document from a Black woman about how the case should be dismissed, preventing things from coming out in discovery, because the Black man that’s suing a league with a racist past — the same league that is led by a commissioner who once publicly apologized to Colin Kaepernick for his racist views — didn’t do a good enough job, to her of all people, of proving racism.
Crazy, right?
In September, Trotter filed his 53-page lawsuit almost six months after the award-winning veteran NFL reporter’s contract with NFL Media wasn’t renewed after he continually questioned Goodell for a lack of diversity throughout the league and in its newsroom. Trotter publicly pressed Goodell at the last two Super Bowl press conferences about the issue and each time Goodell only had excuses, not answers. The lawsuit reads like a peek behind the curtain of how the league “deals with” Black people.
“If Blacks feel some kind of way, they should buy their own team and hire who they want to hire,” is what Trotter alleges in his lawsuit about what Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said in 2020 about why so few Black employees work at the highest levels for the league and NFL teams.
“A Black female diplomat told colleagues that in response to scheduling events during Black History Month, Mr. Johnson asked if he was going to speak to an audience that was, ‘just a bunch of Black people’ and told her that she was ‘marginalizing herself.’ Mr. Johnson also ‘questioned why the Black community celebrates Black History Month,’ and argued that the ‘real challenge’ was that Black fathers did not remain with their families,” is what Trotter also alleges about New York Jets owner Woody Johnson.
“If the Black players don’t like it here, they should go back to Africa and see how bad it is,” is also an allegation in Trotter’s lawsuit about what Buffalo Bills owner Terry Pegula once said. The lawsuit also describes Pegula as once stating that the NFL needed to “have a face, as an African-American, at least a face that could be in the media, we could fall in behind that,” as a way to clean up the league’s “media problem” concerning Kaepernick.
All of that is just what’s in Trotter’s case, we haven’t even got to Flores’ yet.
Despite keeping his employment status active after he was fired from being the head coach of the Miami Dolphins and filing his suit, Flores’s case is on its way to trial, despite how many times the league and Lynch tried to prevent it. And for a league that only has two more permanent head coaches who identify as Black than it did in 1921, the conclusion to how that will play out will be fascinating.
The NFL knows they’re in over their heads when it comes to Flores’s case. It’s why the league and Lynch are trying so hard to get Trotter’s off their plate. And while the legal system will play a huge role in how both of these cases will be remembered, there’s one thing that will never be forgotten. The NFL took part in race-norming for years to prevent hundreds of former Black players from receiving compensation from the league, as it’s a system that assumes Black people have lower cognitive function. Then they went out and hired Loretta Lynch to defend them from allegations of racism — that’s something Black people should commit to memory.