Indefensible

On Monday, Las Vegas Raiders Head Coach Jon Gruden resigned/was fired from the team as a result of derogatory emails he sent dating back 10-15 years surfacing from an internal investigation of the Washington Football Team, and leaks to the New York Times. Yesterday, in response to these emails, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the team he led to a Super Bowl victory in 2002, have removed him from their Ring of Honor. The moment the first email hit the media this past weekend, I knew Jon Gruden would not survive this, and he probably should not. The emails in question are indefensible, and I would hope everyone who has read them would agree. But why were we allowed to read them?

Doesn’t the legal scope of an investigation pertain strictly to evidence gathered on the people being investigated? The investigators were given access to these private emails as part of an investigation into the Washington Football Team’s potential illegal behavior, not Jon Gruden’s. So, releasing the emails of Jon Gruden who was not an employee of the WFT is beyond the scope of the investigation, and should not have been permitted. Regardless of how inflammatory his emails were, releasing them to the public is a violation of privacy, and sets a precedent that threatens everyone’s right to privacy, which leads us down a road that will damage this country much more severely than anything Gruden could have written in his emails.