On Friday, the Washington NFL team’s owner Dan Snyder sued the news outlet Media Entertainment Arts WorldWide for defamation. The New York Times reported that in a lawsuit filed in New Delhi and California, Snyder accused the site of taking money to publish stories about him that it knew were false, including a claim that he was on a list of sex offenders kept by convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Nirnay Chowdhary, one of MEA WorldWide’s founders, has denied the payment claim but acknowledged errors in the stories, which were published in mid-July and have since been deleted.
The MEA stories were published near the time of a report in The Washington Post from July 16, in which 15 women reported being sexually harassed while working for the Washington football team’s office. That report was published days after Snyder made the long-overdue decision to change the team’s name, a racial slur, following significant pressure from several of the team’s sponsors. Snyder has apparently not denied the reports of harassment in the Post, or announced a new name for the team. But in filing a lawsuit against a completely different media organization, he seems to have found one way to take action.
The articles in question were reportedly sourced from Reddit and social media sites. On Monday, though, Snyder also alleged that an ex-executive assistant in Washington’s NFL team’s front office had a role in them too. The Times reported that in a filing in Federal District Court in Virginia, Snyder requested documents from Mary-Ellen Blair to help support the suit.
In a statement, Joe Tacopina, one of Snyder’s lawyers, said, “We are aggressively pursuing Mary-Ellen Blair, a disgruntled former employee who is clearly in the pocket of another and complicit in this scheme to defame Mr. Snyder, in order to ensure that the full weight of the law comes down heavily on all those responsible for these heinous acts.”
The filing also claimed that a few months ago, Blair began to ask current and former team employees for information on Snyder, and that in July, she called someone who works with him closely and said they could “probably make a lot of money.”
Snyder claims that Blair told a team employee that she’d heard that the coming Washington Post story would not be “good for Dan.” Blair allegedly told the employee that “several of the team’s minority owners did not want to do business” with Snyder anymore. Three of the Washington team’s largest minority owners have been trying to sell their shares. Snyder claimed that Blair has had financial problems and that her wages were “garnished” while she was with the team. He also said that she has been provided rent breaks by a “financial benefactor” with connections to one of the minority shareholders trying to sell. When asked about the details of the filing, Blair told the Times, “That’s funny,” and didn’t provide further comment. Her lawyer Lisa J. Banks said they couldn’t comment until they reviewed the filing.
The Times noted that Blair lives in a building owned by Comstock, where Tracy Schar sits on the board of directors. Schar’s father is Dwight Schar, a minority owner of the Washington team who’s looking to sell his stake. The paper also pointed out that Snyder has sued a media company before. In 2010, in a lawsuit he later dropped, Snyder objected to the Washington City Paper’s “encyclopedia of the owner’s many failings.”
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