Authors: Jeff Benedict,Don Yaeger
“This was a misdemeanor case. The way the media covered it was as if I had chopped somebody’s head off.”
Moon also pointed out that he did not undergo any counseling as a result of the domestic violence incident. His wife, on the other hand, did. “Domestic violence calls to police happen all the time,” Moon told the authors. “Some incidents are small and some are big. It could be an argument. It could be a wife throwing a pan through a window. But it’s just part of life and those things are going to happen.”
While Warren Moon is arguably the most famous active-roster NFL player ever to stand trial for domestic violence, he is hardly alone. Weeks before his trial began, a member of the United States Congress asked the NFL to address the “repeated tragic examples [of violence against women] involving professional football players.” The authors obtained a January 24, 1996, letter written by Vermont Congressman Bernard Sanders to Commissioner Paul Tagliabue. “We are writing,” read the letter, “to ask in the strongest terms that the NFL join with us and commit to work together to fashion a multi-faceted strategy to deter domestic violence, including counseling, strong disciplinary action when warranted, and a high-profile education and advertising campaign against domestic violence.” The following is an excerpt from Representative Sanders’s letter to the commissioner:
“We believe the time has come for the NFL to step forward … and assume a leading role in deterring domestic violence among current and future NFL personnel.
“Surely you recognize the enormous influence that big-time football players at the professional and collegiate levels, as role models, have upon our society. Many men identify with NFL players and look on them as both heroes and role models to be emulated off the field. Undoubtedly when instances of domestic violence receive little more than a slap on the wrists in court and go unpunished by the NFL … that sends an insidious and harmful message to many Americans. Unfortunately, the current message being sent seems to be that domestic violence is not to be taken too seriously and that it is not the indefensible and serious crime that it is.
“Finally, we are troubled by public comments of the NFL’s Communications Director, Greg Aiello, to the effect that unless domestic violence affects the business of football, then the NFL should be reticent about taking disciplinary action against professional football players who are charged with domestic violence for fear of possible legal action. That sounds like a short-sighted rationalization to justify the NFL continuing to ignore domestic violence in its own ranks.
“We are appealing to you to make it a top priority to see to it that the men who are privileged to play professional football, as role models, help to publicly condemn domestic violence as a serious crime and do not sluff it off.”
Congressman Sanders’s letter perturbed league officials, who rebuffed him with an accusatory letter of their own. In it, the league warned Sanders that any attempts on his part to single out the NFL on the issue of domestic violence would be treated as racist. More on that later.
It is little surprise that the NFL resisted Congressman Sanders’s proposal. After all, the league even rejected efforts from a member of the so-called NFL family who expressed interest in dealing with players’ domestic violence problems. Former Dolphins defensive back Liffort Hobley successfully organized a group of current and ex-Dolphins to combat domestic violence in the Miami area. Hobley’s group agreed to speak at a symposium sponsored by Women in Distress of Broward County, an organization which brings together local law enforcement officers and domestic violence counselors to combat domestic violence. Hobley, along with Irving Fryar and Troy Vincent (both of whom are currently playing for the Philadelphia Eagles) and numerous other Dolphins players admitted to and condemned their own prior abusive behavior toward women. “Domestic violence was the way of life in my home,” Vincent told those in attendance. “To see my mother get beat was just part of life. It was part of the community to beat your wife, your girlfriend. It was cool. When you’d leave home and go to school, you’d hear some of the guys say, ‘Man, I smacked my girlfriend three times last night.’ Then one of his friends gives him a high five. That was a way of life, and it wasn’t right.”
The results of the players’ candor was a tremendous force for good. According to Bonnie Flynn, the president of Women in Distress of Broward County, hundreds of middle and high school age children were positively impacted by hearing their heroes deliver such a strong message. “The potential for NFL players to spread a message of intolerance for domestic violence is great,” Flynn told the authors in an interview for this book. “The efforts of Liffort and the other Dolphins players have influenced our community’s schoolchildren in a way no other men can. Liffort, especially, has been a true leader here.”
Based on the program’s great success, Hobley proposed a league-wide effort patterned after the Broward County symposiums. But the idea received no support from the NFL and died. “There are a lot of programs out there that have been offered to the NFL,” said Hobley in an interview for this book. However, he was careful not to criticize the league in hopes that it may someday reconsider his proposal to work with other teams. “But it is so hard to get the league to let outside entities come in. They are tough. They want to keep everything inside. They’re a closed book and will not let any outside companies participate in their issues because there are a lot of issues that don’t get addressed, unfortunately. As a player, you know those things. There are lot of things that happen around the league that we don’t discuss because we can’t. It’s a personnel issue and they try to keep those things inside the NFL.”
L
oath to acknowledge the scope of the domestic violence problem within the league, the NFL, as Congressman Sanders and Liffort Hobley both learned, takes exception whenever anyone suggests otherwise. The league argues repeatedly that there is no statistical evidence suggesting athletes are arrested for domestic violence more than any other segment of the male population. While true, this fact alone hardly proves that there is no problem. According to the authors’ research, in fact, domestic violence is the biggest problem the league faces in terms of criminal conduct among its players. Of the 109 criminally accused players in the authors’ player-crime index, they were responsible for forty-five domestic violence arrests. No other crime, including drunk driving, showed up as often in players’ criminal background checks. And arrests statistics only begin to tell the story.
The authors’ research of police records revealed that it is not uncommon for players’ wives to call 911 for help, only to decline to press charges after police have arrived and restored order. The reasons, which are elaborated on below, are primarily: 1) the excessive media attention that their allegations will attract due to the player’s fame, and 2) fear that no one will believe them due to their husband’s status.
In addition to the unwillingness on the part of victims to press charges, there is a unique factor at play when the abuser is an NFL player—he benefits from tactics employed by teams to repress incidents of spousal abuse from coming to the attention of the authorities, as well as the media.
“What you’ve got is a coddled class of people,” domestic violence judge Ed Newman, the former Dolphins lineman, said in an interview for this book. “Instead of being an ordinary person on the street receiving the same punishment, the NFL player may be told ‘Don’t worry about it. Keep on catching the touchdown pass.’ The problem is intercepted before it comes to the light of day.”
Based on his experience as both a player and a judge, Newman agreed with the NFL’s stand in one respect. He insisted that NFL players are no more likely than other males to be involved with domestic violence. Where they differ, he said, is in how they are treated after the fact. “These are darker shadows in the alleyways of life,” said Judge Newman. “The league would rather have blinders on. They want to close that door unless it becomes a liability.”
Interviews conducted by the authors with numerous representatives from NFL teams confirm that it is common for teams to take steps to both insulate players from criminal prosecution and conceal abuse from the public.
The Dallas Cowboys were one of the first teams to provide counseling to players with domestic violence problems, offering the service as far back as 1982. Larry Wansley, an ex-FBI agent, oversaw the counseling program between 1982 and 1989, during which time he met personally with players struggling with family violence. “Domestic violence was not as pervasive as drugs when I was hired by the Cowboys,” said Wansley in an interview for this book. “But it was a big problem. These cases were primarily kept behind closed doors. Law enforcement rarely got involved at that time, and the cases never made it into the newspapers.”
Although Wansley hesitated to give a precise number of players he saw with domestic violence problems while working for Dallas, he confirmed that the overwhelming majority of them were never known by the public. “At the time, I don’t think the term ‘domestic violence’ existed,” Wansley said. “But the crime or the events certainly did. And I had a lot of that. In some cases it was a
big
problem.”
Since the 1980s, public awareness regarding domestic violence has greatly increased and strict law enforcement procedures for responding to family violence crimes have been instituted in many communities. The Minnesota Vikings, like many teams, have internal policies in place to discourage domestic violence complaints from getting to the police.
“We’ve had a couple of cases that have never been brought to light,” confirmed Vikings team president Roger Headrick in an interview with the authors just weeks before Vikings quarterback Warren Moon’s domestic violence trial got underway. According to Headrick, the Vikings had been successful on more than one occasion in getting players in-house counseling, thus avoiding criminal prosecution and public exposure.
In light of Headrick’s admission, the authors sent the names and birth dates of over sixty current and former Vikings players to the following law enforcement agencies located in close proximity to the team’s facilities: the Eden Prairie Police Department, the Minneapolis Police Department, the Bloomington Police Department, the St. Paul Police Department, the Carver County Sheriff’s Department, and the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department. After soliciting from these agencies all available records on any player who had been in contact with police on a criminal matter, the authors discovered eleven reported cases of domestic violence involving seven players. Most of the cases never resulted in an arrest or a news account, due primarily to the victims’ reluctance. The case of Vikings All-Pro defensive end John Randle is representative of what the authors found.
On July 24, 1990, Bloomington police responded to a domestic violence dispute at Randle’s home. However, at the request of Randle’s wife, no charges were filed. Then on September 26, 1991, Eden Prairie police received a 911 call from the Randle home. According to the police report, when the officers approached the house, they could hear the voice of a female inside. “This is it, John,” yelled his wife. “This is the last time you’ll pull this crap.” Police then entered the home and discovered that his wife had sustained bruises to the facial area. After John Randle was arrested for fifth-degree assault and taken to the police station for booking, his wife informed authorities that her husband had a history of abuse, including a prior arrest in Texas. Authorities in Kingsville, Texas, confirmed that Randle had been previously arrested and forfeited his bail after failing to appear in court. Randle later left the state and the case was dropped.
Despite Randle’s arrest in Eden Prairie, the charges were later dropped by prosecutors after his wife took the children and moved out of state. At the time the authors were provided these reports, John Randle was the highest paid defensive player in the NFL, and his contact with authorities due to domestic violence complaints was buried in police files.
Unlike Randle, former Vikings defensive end James Harris (see Chapter 7) is a player who did receive considerable attention in the press after twice being convicted for domestic violence crimes while playing for Minnesota. However, even he was involved in a chilling incident on file that never made it into the press. According to a St. Paul police report dated May 7, 1995, Harris and an associate, Antwon Johnson, forced entry into the apartment of Janice Kopp* and assaulted her. Harris and Johnson were searching for another woman who previously lived with Kopp. When Kopp was unable to tell the men of her former roommate’s whereabouts, Johnson grabbed Kopp by the throat and demanded to know where the woman was. As Kopp tried unsuccessfully to free herself from Johnson’s grip on her throat, her three-year-old son ran toward his mother out of fear. The toddler, as he reached for his mother, was quickly pushed to the ground by one of the men.
“I’ll kill you if you call the police,” Johnson threatened Kopp as he released her. Harris and Johnson then bolted out of the apartment and into Harris’s green Lexus. After initially cooperating with police investigators in the case against Harris and Johnson, Kopp decided to drop the matter in June of 1995 out of fear, she said, for her life and that of her child’s.
This incident never found its way into any Minnesota press reports.
However, the cases of Randle and Harris, like all the cases discovered by the authors, were at least brought to the attention of the authorities by way of a formal police complaint. But Vikings president Roger Headrick conceded personal familiarity with cases that never reached the attention of the public. It is this deeper, more hidden layer of domestic violence cases that holds the key to how NFL teams cover up abusive players’ conduct and protect them from criminal prosecution. In order to access this most hidden sphere of violence, the authors located and talked with nearly a dozen victims of domestic violence. These victims endured years of abuse without going to the authorities for help. Only after it boiled beyond belief, some went forward, but they nonetheless still refrained from pressing charges. Their experiences have never before been mentioned in press accounts.