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Dan Snyder is stamping his tiny little feet and having a screaming tantrum!
That’s unpleasant to witness when a three-year-old does it, but it’s truly troubling to see a 45-year-old, billionaire owner of a pro football team throw a public hissy fit. Snyder owns the once-great-but-now-terrible Washington Redskins, whose on-field ineptness during his ten-year tenure has made long-suffering fans almost insanely mad.
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However, the owner’s tantrum is not directed at his players or coaches, but at a local newsweekly called The Washington City Paper. It dared to publish a long piece deriding Snyder himself as the source of the team’s misery.
What insouciance, shrieked The Dan, as he summoned his legal team to go after the small paper. Their first tactic was raw intimidation. “Mr. Snyder has more than sufficient means to protect his reputation,” the lawyers snarled at City Paper’s owners, crudely implying that if they didn’t give in to Mr. Redskin, he would bury them in legal costs.
But City Paper didn’t fall for such smack talk, so Dan pushed ahead, suing for $2 million in general damages. But his libel suit turns out to be compromised by the fact that the article in question is… well, factual.
This reality led the billionaire to try a trick play, claiming that the article was an offensive, anti-Semitic diatribe against him – an assertion that an independent journalistic observer calls “almost unbearably stupid.” After all, Snyder’s team is called “Redskins,” a slur that Snyder insists ” is not meant to be offensive whatsoever.”
Over privileged corporate crybabies like Dan Snyder are giving hypocrisy a bad name. They denounce “lawsuit abuse” by anyone who dares to sue them, even as they deploy their legal departments to intimidate anyone who crosses them.