The Snyder Files, Part One
On Capitalism and Dishonesty
Last week, the US House Committee on Oversight and Reform released its report on Daniel Snyder, entitled Conduct Detrimental: How the NFL and the Washington Commanders Covered Up Decades of Sexual Misconduct. The provenance of this report is a little strange, but back in 2020, The Washington Post published an exposé on allegations of pervasive sexual harassment in the organization. (I wrote a little about that report last year, when I looked at various “toxic workplaces” in sports.)
That Post story triggered an NFL investigation into the team, but then Roger Goodell refused to release the results of that investigation, and seemed to destroy all evidence of it even existing. So Congress decided to pick the matter up and conduct an investigation.
You might be wondering why the House of Representatives is conducting an investigation into the work environment of a single NFL team — the Republicans on the committee also wondered about this, and accused the committee of being part of a Democratic plot to try to force a sale of the team to Jeff Bezos (it being an article of faith among Republicans that Bezos is some secret leftist controlling the Democratic Party). More likely, the Democrats on the committee were just trying to score easy political points by hammering an odious target like Snyder, who pretty much everyone hates. But either way, the committee had to wrap up before next year, when Republicans take control of the House.
The actual report is not great. It’s kind of disorganized and poorly written. Most of its interesting findings were already reported by major media outlets, and it makes a lot of generalizations that are hard to pin to evidence. The whole thing seems like a way of promoting two bills that the committee’s chair, Representative Carolyn Maloney, has introduced.
But the report is well-sourced, and for this reason it is worth dwelling on. It includes 261 footnotes, most of which link to depositions, statements, and interviews the committee conducted.* Altogether, it runs ~1,000 pages long, and it paints an interesting portrait of how a pro sports team is run, and the weird shadow legal system that capitalists operate within. I’m still making my way through it all, but I plan to share some highlights here as I go.
*These reports exist online, but another really stupid thing about the report is that all the links in the footnotes are typed wrong, so you can’t just click on them and find the information being cited, nor can you copy and paste them into a browser. You have to copy it, and then manually fix all the mistakes if you want to find the right source. This is what happens when you defund the administrative state…
I’m not going to start with the report itself, but with the memo that Republicans on the committee released criticizing the report. That’s where they accused the report of being part of a Jeff Bezos conspiracy. The memo itself is only five pages long (the main report is 79 pages), but they include 21 pages of excerpts that are meant to discredit the committee, by showing that certain witnesses were unreliable.
For example, they include two pages of testimony from Jason Friedman, who worked for the team for 24 years, including as the Vice President of Premium Sales. Friedman served as a witness, both to specific incidents of alleged harassment and a general climate of bullying and retaliation. The Republicans, however, claim that he is an unreliable witness “who levied many baseless accusations,” and attach pages alleging that he “frequently altered his story.”
But their evidence is all stuff like this excerpt:
Democratic Staff: Taking a look at the letter itself, one of the first things you say is, “I hope I might have the opportunity to work for you again in the future.” Is this where you tried to communicate to Mr.Snyder that you in fact wanted your job back?
Friedman: Yes. Or a job with the team. My first love was the team, not tickets. So if the team would offer me a job in another department, I probably would have jumped at the opportunity . But in a perfect world, I would have gotten my exact job back.
Democratic Staff: Now, you go on to say, “I feel comfortable saying it now this garbage in the newspaper is bothersome . The article was a hit job.” What did you mean when you said the garbage in the newspaper is bothersome and what did you mean when you called the article a hit job?
Friedman: Well, “hit job” is his term, that whatever the most recent article that had been written prior to November 9th or the most recent large exposé that the Post would do he referred to as “a hit job.” And in this letter, I was saying that I agreed it was a hit job.
Democratic Staff: When you say he referred to it as a hit job, who are you referring to?
Friedman: Mr. Snyder. That I remember seeing his response in the paper or on a press release saying that The Washington Post did a hit job on him.
Democratic Staff: Why did you think – strike that. Why did you want to include the words that Mr. Snyder used in the article in this letter to him?
Friedman: Just to show that I agreed with him.
Democratic Staff: Did you in fact agree with him?
Friedman: No, I did not agree with him, because the article in the newspaper contained things that I know to be true related to Rachel Engleson and Emily Applegate that I just know are true. So, I am ashamed of this. I was trying to suck up to him.
This is, apparently, their smoking gun. The fact that Friedman might, in the course of trying to get his job back, suck up to his boss by saying something he did not believe, but which he knew his boss believed, is evidence that Friedman is a dishonest person.
It’s easy to laugh at the absurdity of this, but it is a major vulnerability of all these “toxic workplace” investigations. People at work are constantly saying things they don’t believe to impress their bosses. This is dishonest, but it’s such a boring kind of dishonesty that it barely even registers as lying. I doubt that, when Friedman was filling out this card, that he experienced serious moral misgivings about saying what his boss wanted to hear. That’s just what people do.
And if you don’t do this, you are not likely to be successful in any capitalist enterprise. To be clear, I’m not just trying to cynically say that everyone has to lie to get ahead. But everyone has to learn how to please their boss. Some people are lucky to have bosses who value honesty, or who will not retaliate against people for saying what they don’t want to hear. Dan Snyder does not seem like such a boss…
More to the point, telling little white lies like this — “Ugh, those people criticizing you are being so unfair, boss.” — is just easier. In a world where the capitalist class has near-absolute power over workers, it’s just simpler and safer to tell them what they want to hear than it is to hope they have an appreciation for our honest perspective.
I realize I’m not exactly breaking new ground with the observation that people often suck up at work. But what’s interesting in this case is how this mundane reality gets weaponized against workers. Because here we have members of the committee saying, “You can’t trust Friedman because one time he told his boss something that wasn’t true.” It’s easy to dismiss this as simply a stupid attack by some Republican members of Congress. But it comes up in more consequential settings all the time.
Every time there is an investigation into a “toxic workplace,” these questions get thrown at witnesses and accusers: Why didn’t you speak up sooner? Did you do anything at the time to register your disapproval? How come you didn’t go to HR? Didn’t you laugh at the joke you now say was offensive? Etc. The subtext of all these questions is that either you must be lying NOW — in which case you are an opportunist or a “disgruntled former employee” — or you must have been lying THEN — in which case you are complicit and untrustworthy.
But the truth is obviously much simpler. Sometimes people go along with bad things when it is in their economic interest to ignore them, and then when those economic interests change, they are more willing to point out the bad things. The problem is that this does make it legitimately hard to trust people; it would be nice if everyone could just be honest all the time. But this requires reining in the power of the capitalist class.