Jameis Winston facing suspension, but not for allegedly groping Uber driver – report
Ask the people who think football is nothing more than but a safe harbor for terrible men who do awful things to women to provide some evidence of their claim and, if they’ve done their homework, they’ll point to people like Jameis Winston, quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
After all, Winston is a guy who allegedly raped a coed on campus when he was in college, and Florida State found itself on the receiving end of a lawsuit when it hemmed and hawed about even bothering to investigate, never mind allow the alleged victim the dignity of not feeling like she’d lost her mind when everyone chose to believe the glory-boy football star.
And now “the ever-present football player rapist” (to steal a line from the Butthole Surfers’ 1996 song “Pepper”) is about to get another slap on the wrist.
It’s not even for the sexual assault that Winston allegedly committed against an Uber driver in March of 2016, grabbing her by her sensitive bits without her consent.
It’s related to that, but the punishment is not for sexual assault. It’s for failing to report trouble with the law in a timely manner to the NFL.
Jeff Cameron of WTSM-FM in Tallahassee reported that the league will suspend Winston.
“What he’ll be suspended over is a failure to report,” Cameron said on his show. “And that’s frustrating. That’s a league obviously attempting, and understandably because they’ve made previous mis-steps, transgressions, they’re now apt to protect themselves to the n-th degree and protect the shield and so on and so forth.
“The league can’t worry about what’s real and what isn’t. They have to go by perception and PR and protect themselves.
“This is what I do know: The Winston camp is prepared for the NFL to levy a suspension of some kind,” Cameron added. “The thought from the Winston camp is that would be a maximum of three games. I do not know at this time whether or not they plan to appeal, and I do not know that three games is an accurate number. I’ve been told that would seem to be the maximum number of games that the suspension could be. It’s also likely that it’s less than that and it’s one game.”
There is a provision in the league’s Personal Conduct Policy that players are required “to promptly report any matter that comes to their attention (through, for example, victim or witness reports, law enforcement, or media reports) that may constitute a violation of this Policy.“
More specifically, “Failure to report an incident will be grounds for disciplinary action. This obligation to report is broader than simply reporting an arrest; it requires reporting to the league any incident that comes to the club’s or player’s attention which, if the allegations were true, would constitute a violation of the Personal Conduct Policy.”
Bucs coach Dirk Koetter was asked when the team became aware of the incident. Koetter’s response was that the team learned about it from reading the story when it broke on BuzzFeed in November of 2017, which in terms of an organizational intel failure is right up there with if the State Department didn’t know about a North Korean nuclear test until they read about it in the Washington Post.
Someone in the Bucs organization should’ve been on top of things.
But giving the team the benefit of the doubt, what this most likely means is that the incident occurred, Winston swept it under the rug and didn’t tell a soul, possibly because given his history with women he didn’t believe he’d done anything wrong, and when the media got wind of it, they reported it.
The awful optics are just all over the shop on this one.
For one thing, the policy is worded in a way that can be easily interpreted to mean the league cares more about its image than about the victims of its players’ bad behavior.
For another, the punishment will be a slap on the wrist. Winston will very likely miss the opening game of the season, and while he could miss as many as three games, nobody connected to the story seems to think that will be the case.
Of course, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is infamous for capricious punishments that seem beholden to the whims of popular opinion. Ask Ray Rice what happens when the league changes its mind after a PR headache — Rice was originally suspended two games in 2014 for an act of domestic violence before someone rightly pointed out that it meant beating the snot out of your girlfriend was, in the eyes of the league, only half as bad as letting air out of a football.
Rice hasn’t played since.
What nobody is talking about is that the Buccaneers continue to employ a man who has a consistent, repeated track record of violating the sexual consent of women.
The fact that Winston either didn’t know or didn’t care that such an assault was a reportable offense under the league conduct policy ought to sweep him onto the pile of guys with “character issues” who wash out of the league, especially if they’re coming off years where they went 3-10 as a starter.
And the Buccaneers themselves, who haven’t made the playoffs since 2007, now have a hole at quarterback as they try to get back to the postseason for the first time in 11 years.
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