A Washington State sheriff named John Urquhart is going after the NFL over the Josh Brown domestic violence case after the organization blamed his office for not disclosing more about the situation.
Earlier this week, reports from USA Today suggested that the New York Giants kicker had abused his ex-wife Molly Brown. The NFL had rushed to suspend Mr. Brown for one game without knowing all the details of the case.
The league blamed Urquhart’s agency for not providing more information in a biting statement, which read:
“NFL investigators made repeated attempts — both orally and in writing — to obtain any and all evidence and relevant information in this case from the King County sheriff’s office. Each of those requests was denied and the sheriff’s office declined to provide any of the requested information, which ultimately limited our ability to fully investigate this matter.”
The King County official is not happy with the recent developments and was glad to hit back. He said during a radio interview:
“I don’t like to get pushed around by a bully. Or I can be charitable and say they don’t know the facts. They don’t understand how public disclosure works. That’s a better way to put it, if I felt like being charitable. I don’t like the NFL taking shots at the sheriff’s office when it’s not deserved. It’s real simple.”
Urquhart said that his office only denied the request from the NFL because the case was till active and his team never really understood where it was coming from since the person working for the league failed to identify themselves properly. He explained:
“We didn’t use the Google to Google this guy’s name (until Thursday). Turns out, he is a security representative based in Seattle for the NFL. He never told us that.”
Urquhart also added this interesting piece of information:
“Since it was a hot button item and since it’s the NFL, we probably would have told them orally a little bit more about we had. We would have told (the NFL investigator), or I would have told him, ‘Be careful, NFL. Don’t rush into this. This case is blossoming way more than what happened on May 22 of 2015. We are getting more information. We wouldn’t have gotten into specifics, but we would have cautioned the NFL to be careful with what they were going to do.”
The case was closed in September because the ex-wife was not cooperating with prosecutors, but in light of the recent revelations, Josh Brown is expected to get a longer suspension.
In conclusion, no one is really clean in this case. The NFL that is facing a decline in ratings because of the national anthem protests misread the situation. This is reminiscent of how poorly the league handled previous cases of domestic violence. The sheriff is seen as a controversial figure by some people in his county, who say that he is overplaying his hand with this “feud.” It is now clear that this mess could get uglier in the upcoming weeks.
