May 14, 2024, 7:20 PM ET
Three Nevada judges ruled in favor of the NFL in a lawsuit by Jon Gruden against his former team, the Raiders.
A panel of Three justices of the Nevada Supreme Court on Tuesday sided with the NFL against former Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden, saying that he was subject to arbitration even as a former employee and therefore was not eligible to sue the league for his dismissal in 2021.
Jon Gruden, exponent of the Las Vegas Raiders. AP Photo/John Locher, File
Judges Elissa F. Cadish and Kristina Pickering They reversed a district court’s order denying the NFL’s motion to force Gruden’s complaint into his arbitration process. The case was returned to the lower court with an order granting the motion for arbitration.
Judge Linda Marie Bell disagreed with the majority’s interpretation of the arbitration clause in the NFL Constitution and sided with Gruden’s lawyerswho argued that it does not apply to former employees.
“I don’t agree with your conclusion. because the facts of this case do not support the survival of the clause beyond the end of Gruden’s employment,” Bell wrote in his dissent.
Demand for Gruden accuses NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell of ‘directly leaking’ racist emails and misogynists in an attempt to damage Gruden’s reputation and force him to resign as Raiders coach in October 2021.
Gruden filed his lawsuit in November 2021weeks after resigning under pressure when some of his emails more than a decade earlier were published by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The emails had surfaced in the league’s investigation into then-Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder.
Gruden told ESPN last year that the league “thought they could cherry-pick emails from years ago, when I wasn’t even a coach, and try to end my career.” At the time, league spokesman Brian McCarthy told ESPN that “neither the NFL nor the commissioner leaked Coach Gruden’s offensive emails.”
The NFL has asked courts to dismiss Gruden’s claimsaying that a clause in his contract with the Raiders required him to pursue his claim through league arbitration.
Gruden’s attorney, Adam Hosmer-Henner, argued that arbitration, a process controlled by the NFL and where any discovery would not be made public, would be unfair to his client because Gruden is no longer an employee of the league.
Hosmer-Henner assured that Gruden would seek a hearing before the seven justices of the Nevada Supreme Court.
“The panel’s split decision would leave Nevada as an outlier where an employer can unilaterally determine whether an employee’s dispute should go to arbitration and would also allow the employer to resolve the dispute as an arbitrator,” Hosmer-Henner said. Attorney Kannon Shanmugam, who represents the NFL, declined to comment on the ruling.
2024-05-14 23:20:00
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