DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Pure Football Forum Trade for Watson 2

Ahhhh. You think you triggered me. Bless you. But thanks, I got a laugh out of all this at least.

Every media outlet i read is shaming and blasting browns for the trade based on moral ideals....dont think rodger isnt listening...he wont want the negative PR the browns are getting....it wouldnt surprise me one bit he doesnt drop a 1 year suspension.

j/c...



Full document here...

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20619132-deshaun-watson-original-answer

well, i just read it.

wonder who else did. thread got kinda quiet.

anybody who speaks legalese, can you explain what "Mr. Watson request a jury trial" means?

I am sure there were band wagoners who jumped on this - and that's mentioned in this.

Wanting a Jury trial? Seems like strong arm tactics to me. No-one invoked the law and courts more than Trump, I don't think every time he did that he was in the right.

As for the thread went quiet for 20 minutes as if that was like people being chased away? LOL. I thought you were better than that.

why do you guys keep bring up trump?

sigh, for the record, trump settled out of court a lot. also, he has 5 kids by 3 different women, accused of sexual harassment/assault god knows how many times, paid off a porn star he cheated with while married to his 3rd wife, and yet not only became president, but even more people voted for him in 2020.

its mind boggling how america can hold an NFL QB to a hire standard than the freaking POTUS, but lemme stop before this thread gets moved to PP.

you only want to consider one side and not the other. i thought you were better than that, as well. but i guess we're both surprising each other lately.

You also realize that his first accuser only went to the police at Watson and his lawyers request! They started calling him in January 2021 and was trying to extort $30,000 from him for a consensual encounter. She wanted paid or she was going to expose him for the act. Although, she herself on a recorded phone conversation even called the act consensual. This was Watson's lawyers main defense. There is a youtube video from a Houston news station. The news station's legal council predicted the grand jury decision because of this evidence. Also, most of the other women were contacted by the first clients lawyers. I am not saying they are lying because I do not have all the facts. But, the extortion is a bad look and it seems very fishy the number of accusers that jumped into the suit only after contacted by first accusers lawyers.

So what are we looking at here, Milk Man? Are these court documents? Watson's official response to the charges? Not understanding how a guy named Real Xavier P has this info, but I haven't seen it elsewhere. That doesn't mean I couldn't have missed it, but you would think Watson's team - and the Browns - would have it on blast to media outlets everywhere.

Why did I bring up trump? because you made a reference to something that Trump has done which is seek to take things to court. It does not mean that Watson is guilty or not guilty. It's a good reference point whether you want to admit it or not. It's got nothing to do with his wife or anything else regards his family - his whole life Trump has used the courts as a way to strong arm to get his way or to silence people who claim he wronged them. And no one wants the QB to have higher standards than the POTUS - where on earth di you get that from? Not from me.

And no - I don't want to consider just one side. And I don't use a 20 minute pause in comments to try and suggest that the "other side" have been stumped.

But there is a lot to this situation - and much of it is being dismissed out of hand by some, which I'll continue to highlight. Here's what I just wrote in the Baker thread that highlights I am not all on one side or the other


IN response to that Bull just suggested that because the 22 share the same lawyer somehow it's questionable. . . that completely ignores how the legal process works in this country. If it was unusual or unprecedented ... that'd raise flags. But - for example - the 33 of Bill Cosby's accusers all signed with the same lawyer. It's just how it's done.

Court documents.

The documents were originally reported in/by Law and Crime.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20619132-deshaun-watson-original-answer

It was more about the lawyer that they share than that they share a lawyer.

And that lawyer happens to be neighbors with the owner of the Texans? Or does that lawyer have a history of frivolous law suits?

I could care less that the lawyer is somehow marginally connected to the owner. I mean seriously. [1] How dumb would you have to be to contrive and illegal scheme to fabricate accusations against one of the most famous athletes in the country and then use your neighbor? [2] How did these 50+ incidents and women all magically meet and massage Watson ? Anyone want to think Watson shared his sexual deviance with teammates and his employer and that this schtick was known?

That’s fine.

I read the documents of Watson’s defense. Combine that with the fact that the GJ didn’t indict - despite the fact that sexual misconduct/assault is low hanging fruit for any prosecutor to get an indictment- leads credence to Watson.

Does that make him innocent? Maybe, maybe not. But the grand jury had the evidence, had the women testifying, and didn’t bother to indict. All a GJ needed was probable cause, and they didn’t even get that.

Again, they have far more information available to them than you and I ever could. So please, take it up with the GJ with why you think they got it wrong.

I’m just a dude on the board.

Where are you seeing sexual misconduct suits are low hanging fruit?

If you read that some place, I would absolutely question the source and the spin.

Less than 1.0% of sex abuse cases end in convictions.
Less than 6% of reported cases end in arrest.
31% aren't even reported because females don't want to be subjugated to the process.

That is not low hanging fruit.

Somebody clearly doesn’t know the difference between being charged and convicted. One comes before the other broskie.

If you want a conversation I will continue and show why those stats matter.

If you want to run with "Again, they have far more information available to them than you and I ever could. So please, take it up with the GJ with why you think they got it wrong." ... we can leave it.

We can leave it then.

I could care less about the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon stuff. It's more the fact that he's the kind of guy that held fundraisers for Trump at his mansion, later said he wouldn't support Trump any longer but then turned right around and gave $500k to his inauguration committee shortly thereafter. (link) Throw in the fact that he wants to be mayor of Houston in conjunction with the timing of the lawsuit, and the guy just doesn't seem particularly trustworthy.

I suppose I might say that of most lawyers and politicians, and this guy is both.

This. And add to that, while I don't know any of the shenanigans with trump fundraising, donations and flip flopping on his support.... just like the fact that all 22 are with one lawyer, if it wasn't standard practice and the 'norm' then I would pay attention to it. As it is - the spin in parts of the media is that this lawsuit coincided with Watson not playing for Houston with the insinuation very much that it was orchestrated by the owner. Maybe you aren't saying that, but that is the air play regards the lawyer and the timing.

He opted for a jury verses a judge deciding.

All the legal stuff will shake out eventually. Until then, none of us know what we think we know.

I've noticed that some fans have difficulty understanding being innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

They, the accusers, parties, lawyers failed to produce enough evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to prove Watson guilty of certain charges. There's still the civil trial and I don't know what the outcome will be, Watson will probably have to pay money. In any event, if I were Watson I'd pursue separate defamation cases against wrongful accusers.

This right here.

I asked my daughter about her opinion regarding DeShaun Watson.

Maybe she’s biased because of her has being on the other side of the table in a rape case but she said following. (I didn’t tell her anything about my opinion I just asked her to google the case.)

The first hurdle is to convince yourself that you did nothing wrong and that you has been part of a criminal act. If there is no witnesses, no physical evidence or any other proofs then it’s easy to be insecure and blame yourself. With that comes isolation and loneliness. Days goes by to weeks and maybe months, years and for every day it get’s harder and harder to talk to someone.

When she finally talked to her best friend, later her family, then comes the shame. Questions who’s sometimes is difficult to answer. Why wait so long? Are you sure you remember correctly? But he didn’t hurt you? You have no evidence so the police maybe don’t believe in you?

Going to the police is probably the worst. You have to remember exact time, day, where and how, how you where dressed, what you said and didn’t said, why you didn’t walk away, said no more powerful and so on. A skillful policeman and especially a professional lawyer can easily make you nervous, insecure, you start to doubt your own memories and if you’re not mentally strong enough it’s easy to break down.

At the court house you face the public, media, the man you accuse, often a aggressive lawyer and at that time you probably don’t even care if you win or not. You just want to disappear and never seen again. Your story will be scrutinized and your private life will be exposed and drawn to the mud.

No women do this voluntary or without help and backing from their family, Win or lose is often irrelevant when it’s over. Very few cases go all the way and only a tiny fraction can prove guilt.

My daughter didn’t have any opinion if DS Watson is guilty or not she only said she feels very strongly for these 22 women. She said the NFL community is strong, rich and powerful. Cleveland Browns has invested $230m, draft picks and reputation so they will do whatever necessary to take care of the public opinion. NFL and the Browns supporters will take care of the rest. These 22 women have already lost before this circus even start.

This was the opinion from a 22 year old women who has been thru a similar experience but on a much much smaller arena. Sorry for my bad English and being personal but I think I owe this to my lovely daughter. With that I end my little crusade.

I wonder if the FO expected nearly this much blow back on the DW trade? I imagine with season tickets going on sale at the same time, they got their ears full.

It means he has a better chance to be found not guilty with 12 people without jobs judging him.

What? I have not cast any stones and never claimed to be without sin.

OK People have left the building, the Browns, etc...
It seems to me the ones you should be jumping on is/are the NFL in general.
If the NFL had banned him then there would be no problem.......... oh wait they had no grounds to.........
If you think he's a predator and he had gone to another team would you quit watching NFL Football?
If you say no then that is hypocrisy ........

The Lawyer filing suit is not doing it Pro Bono... he is a Civil Suit suit..... he gets a cut of the action....he will be making a TON of cash here............
Watch all the ads for lawsuits on TV.... it's a thriving business.... is it a valid claim he's filing... we'll see.....

There's a waitlist for Browns season tickets. Season tickets are sold out.

Yes
Yes for 230 million
Yes

They will..he came to Cleveland, ya know Rodger and his hate for Cleveland...



Did he get rejected by Cleveland, for an only fans ?

Here are some possible reasons why Deshaun was not indicted by the Houston grand jury. These claims don't get much play from the national media. But the Houston grand jury must have paid attention.

https://www.click2houston.com/news/...ons-accusers-attempted-to-blackmail-him/

https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/deshaun-watson-fbi/285-3b4e5cae-7c8e-4b30-bac3-cf60ab2ed00d

https://www.khou.com/article/news/l...285-4cfd4fc4-8014-450f-a889-07711242a992

I'm only on page 2 of this thread, but I'm about halfway through the following article, which is extremely thorough.

https://www.si.com/nfl/2021/05/21/n...n-sexual-misconduct-lawsuits-daily-cover

Sorry if this has already been linked.

I just want to say that I do appreciate you sharing your perspective on this. Along the lines of "everyone is allowed to feel what they feel" on the topic, I appreciate hearing a perspective that I could never even begin to fathom. My daughter will be born next month, so it's gotten me thinking along those lines. Generally, I don't appreciate people trying to bash others over the head with their opinions/beliefs, but I don't begrudge you for getting passionate after what you went through.

Part of me wants to bury this in my back of my head forever because it's just sports fandom, but I do subscribe to the "toleration is acceptance" and "voting with your wallet" mindsets. Ignoring this would be hypocritical, IMO.

I also appreciate whoever opened up the "deal only" thread. Keeping that thread specific to the football and financial side of the trade will allow both to breathe, IMO.

The Truth And Shame Of The Deshaun Watson Trade

https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.c...-raiders-nfl-fmia-peter-king/?cid=fmiatw

I am not going to write about the difference Deshaun Watson makes in the Cleveland Browns as a football team. There will be time for that—five years. Five obscenely expensive years, in which the Browns will pay a question mark $2.7 million per game to play football.

I am going to write about the Browns selling their souls for a football player who has 22 open accusations of sexual assault or sexual harassment against him.

This is all necessary, of course, because the Browns acquired Watson from Houston in a blockbuster trade on Friday. Cleveland sent three first-round picks (including the No. 13 overall pick in April’s draft), a 2023 third-rounder and a 2024 fourth-rounder in exchange for Watson and a 2024 fifth-rounder. As part of the deal, Cleveland gave Watson a new five-year, $230 million contract.

The Lead: Watson

I don’t think any team should go into business with a player—though cleared of criminal charges—who has 22 women accusing him of indecent acts. Thirty-one teams should have risen up and said, We might be interested in this great football player, but only after we know the full scope of what we’re dealing with. The fact is, they don’t know. Watson could be faultless, and he could have run into 22 women, all of whom are lying, as his attorney Rusty Hardin thinks. That would be an incredible coincidence, 22 women all lying. But let the legal system play this out.

What happens, do you think, if the cases run their course and the Browns find they’ve handed $230 million, guaranteed, to a man who loses some of these civil suits, or one, or all? What happens if even some of the ghoulish and sexually graphic offenses described in the reporting of Jenny Vrentas for Sports Illustrated in the last year are true? Extrapolate. How would Browns fans—women and, I hope, men—feel about wearing their WATSON 4 jerseys in the community and to games? How would you feel about your children wearing them?

I stress: We are innocent till proven guilty in this country. But in what other business, in what other line of work, would a person with such serious accusations against him be handed a guaranteed $230 million to lead the jewel of the community, a prized and beloved public trust like the Cleveland Browns?

I don’t know how this happened, and I don’t know whether there was internal disagreement among the owners or executives of the Browns about signing Watson. I don’t know if the Browns volunteered to do this five-year, $230-million deal, the one with $80 million more in guarantees than any contract in NFL history, or if it was what Watson’s camp insisted. It doesn’t matter. The result is the result: Deshaun Watson got a $74-million raise after sitting out the 2021 season (the difference between his Houston contract and the new Cleveland pact) while his legal fate was being decided. How does this happen?

What is also reprehensible is the fact that Watson’s signing bonus is a reported $45 million, while his first-year salary is a relatively puny $1.035 million, which becomes significant if he gets suspended, as is widely expected. The suspension and resulting fine would come out of his salary only. Say the NFL bans him for six games. The fine would be $345,000, which is seven-tenths of 1 percent of his 2022 compensation.

It’s hard to be more outraged about this story, but that last paragraph makes me want to spit nails.

Owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam signed off on it all, obviously, and will have to live with the consequences. Those consequences might be a Super Bowl, or two, in the next five years. That’s why they’re going out on such a risky limb, of course.

Those consequences, for now, are these, from the community:

The Cleveland Rape Crisis Center said Saturday, “We understand the story surrounding Deshaun Watson joining the Cleveland Browns is triggering for far too many of our friends and neighbors … To the community we say, we see you. We hear your outrage. We feel it too.”

Doug Lesmerises, a writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, quoted a woman, 23-year-old Molly Rose of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, who wrote to him saying: “I don’t know how to root for a team I’ve loved my whole life when every time I see their QB it reminds me of my own experiences being a victim of sexual assault. It may sound dramatic, but my heart is broken.”

“They chased the joy, and they dented the pride,” Lesmerises wrote.

They better hope it’s only dented.

Usually after you make a trade for the quarterback you believe will make you a contender for the next 10 years, you have a press conference trumpeting the event. The Browns waited till Sunday to issue three statements—one each from the Haslams, from GM Andrew Berry and from coach Kevin Stefanski. “We are acutely aware and empathetic to the highly personal sentiments expressed about this decision,” the statement from ownership said. The owners said they spent “a tremendous amount of time” in “in-depth conversations” in a “comprehensive evaluation process.” They said Watson was “humble, sincere and candid” and “embraces the hard work needed to build his name both in the community and on the field.”

We did our due diligence, in other words. What did you expect? But words and statements don’t matter now. The action of signing a player with so much hanging over him, that’s what matters.

I am also going to write about the National Football League, which is very good at making billions, not so good with the moral compass.

The NFL is good at marketing the game to women, at having breast-cancer awareness and pink cleats, at hosting Women’s Careers in Football Forums, at trumpeting female game officials, scouts and assistant coaches. But when it comes time to discipline the owner of the Washington franchise for a string of sexual harassment (and worse) cases against women, all the NFL could muster up was fining Daniel Snyder $10 million, about 3 percent of his franchise’s annual TV revenue, and making him hand over the day-to-day ops of the organization to his wife for several months. Snyder wasn’t banned from being part of the organization. While $10 million is a lot of money, it is also about 2 percent of an average team’s annual total revenue.

How do women who go to work in the league office every day, or women who work for teams, feel when they see the hushing-up of what surely would have been a damning report on Snyder? How do they feel when the league sits idly by and watches one of its most popular franchises, Cleveland, chase after a tarnished (to put it mildly) star? The league is alienating the part of its fan base, women, it is marketing so aggressively.

The moral of the story is if you’re good enough, or you’re rich enough, all else can be overlooked.

The NFL will be in-person for its annual league meetings starting next Sunday, the first time every significant league figure will be together since the last non-virtual meetings in 2019. Roger Goodell needs to show he’s more than a business leader who makes 32 owners richer by the day. Goodell needs to show he’s a moral leader as well. I don’t know how he can look at the last few days in the NFL, with four teams vying for Watson’s services and the winner looking so craven and embarrassing in the process, and not feel shame about the direction of the league.

Free agency and the start of trading in a new league year is always a fun and rejuvenating time. This year, I feel like I just drank a quart of sour milk. The bad taste will take a while to go away.

46 mill per year will be cheap for a QB in 5 years.

The real question is, does he play like a $46mil QB for the next 5 years?

Then he (being a hypocrite) proceeds to condemn Watson for being accused even though the GJ deceided not to.

j/c...

So essentially any team that didn't have franchise QB or perhaps a rookie recently drafted allegedly went after Watson? Interesting.

From The Jason Lloyd article....

They did, however, speak extensively with three female attorneys associated with Hardin’s defense team. They were the women, including attorney Letitia Quinones, who vetted Watson on whether or not to take the case. They went to Georgia, where Watson was staying, and spent two days gathering information before agreeing to represent him. What the female attorneys told the Browns about the case went a long way toward getting the Haslams comfortable with moving forward and pursuing a trade for Watson.

.....

Mulugheta called Berry on Thursday and told him they weren’t getting Watson, but Berry remained persistent. He called Mulugheta back Thursday night to discuss another one of his clients, and at the end of the call turned it back to Watson. He asked what the Browns could’ve done better or differently, then reiterated the team remained interested in him.

Carolina had yet to be eliminated, but the Panthers wouldn’t guarantee the third and fourth years on Watson’s contract. The Browns saw it as an opportunity.

Berry informed the Browns’ staff Friday morning they may not be out of it after all. By Friday afternoon, the two sides were agreeing to a staggering five-year, $230 million deal that was fully guaranteed, the richest guaranteed contract in league history. Included in the deal: a $45 million signing bonus and $1 million base salary in 2022 that helps protect Watson from the financial implications of any league suspension.

Watson’s side never shopped the offer. When the stunning announcement was made that Watson was headed to Cleveland and contract details emerged, one team called and asked why it wasn’t given an opportunity to match — because, they insisted, they would have. The answer: Watson wanted to go to Cleveland. His only hurdle had been moving to a city where he’d never really been before.