Deshaun Watson, Mike Wallace, John Wertheim discussed on The MMQB NFL Podcast
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
60 minutes is so cool. And you gotta do like Mike Wallace though or something. Mike Wallace, that's true. More safer. John wertheim. John wartime of Sports Illustrated. Come on. Worth ons from the new class. That's true. He's like, he's like in family matters, like all of a sudden one year, like you just turned it on and then the wife is different. Carl's wife is different. It's just a different Gloria. It's just different person. They do that to you sometimes. Still good. That's John worth on. All right, so we got a couple of things coming up here. We're going to talk to him deshaun Watson at the top. We're also going to talk about the Steelers new general manager. We'll have a little bit of Pro Bowl, just a little bit of Pro Bowl talk, and then I got trouble takes, baby. Oh, I got no pro ball takes. I have a show's worth of Pro Bowl takes. We'll get to it. I will grit my teeth and we'll get to it. And in just a few minutes, we're going to be joined by Stephanie Epstein of Sports Illustrated to talk about the Trevor Bauer situation Major League Baseball, which has some similarities we're not talking apples to apples, but some similarities with the deshaun Watson, cases, but that's where we are starting here deshaun Watson on HBO real sports on Tuesday night. Two of the women who have shared their accounts of sexual misconduct and are currently filing civil suits against Watson spoke to HBO, one of Watson's attorneys also spoke to HBO with kind of his side of the story there. But we'll start with sort of the broader point here, which is this is really the first time we've seen from independent national media outlet, basically the video presentation of the story. We at Sports Illustrated that obviously you have basically put out every single piece of evidence on the actual case, but video makes a difference. It does. And I thought, you know, I commend the two women who went on Tuesday. I can't imagine that's easy. We work in a sports environment that we know is unfriendly to women in general. And I think anyone who's had the, I don't know. I don't know what you would call a desire to scroll through comments on any of these stories. And so you know what they're setting themselves up for. They know kind of how horrifying and unfair and dark this period is going to be, but there's just been a continued concerted effort to get their truth out there. And so I think, you know, kudos to them for doing it. I can't imagine that's easy. I can't imagine talking about the worst day of my life over and over again. And I think it makes a difference. I think we're starting to see, I mean, Kevin Stefanski was asked about it again today. During their was it OTAs, mini camp, whatever's going on right now. So I think it keeps it in the public consciousness, and I think it keeps the browns from having to be like, now, you know, there's nothing else we can do about this. So one thing we've gotten a sense of in the past 24 or 48 hours here is a little more of what Watson's defense is. He did have one of his attorneys on the HBO show sort of responding and reacting to again these accounts, which have come out. A couple of things that I want to mention before we get into one very specific part of their events, but first of all, I know russie harden has come out and said, you know, well, we chose not to try this through the media. Et cetera, et cetera. Well, they did. They did multiple press conferences. I have personally spent 8 to ten hours a total on the phone with their legal team, which is totally normal, but the busby team did not interact with us very much. Even when we had a lot of information criticizing them, they just didn't get into it. We offer both sides a chance to speak off the record. If they'd like, the hardened camp had taken advantage of that, I will say, because they kind of broke the agreement. First of all, when rusty basically flat out said that Jenny had some sort of Jenny friend who's had some sort of vendetta against Sean Watson and was biased and reporting. They did not like one of our questions to them, which we did not make public. That did they think it was appropriate to have a female attorney who had identified as a sexual assault survivor, basically make the argument at a press conference that Desean Watson was essentially too desirable to have done anything without consent because a lot of people would want to sleep with him. Therefore, these women also must have wanted to sleep with them. It seemed like a very inappropriate argument to make to us. They took a lot of umbrage with the way we freeze the question. And rusty Hardin. Ran with that. And said that Jenny was a biased reporter and it was all just kind of absurd. So I do want to set aside this misconception that Watson's camp has not attempted to try this in the media because they have and Tony busby obviously very, very much as. But one very specific thing that has come out is the Watson camp is now essentially saying that there were three women who had consensual sexual acts after massages with deshaun Watson. Now that there's 19 other plaintiffs, there are two others who file criminal complaints. There was the woman who goes by the student, Mary, who spoke to Sports Illustrated, but is not filing a civil suit at this point. There were more than two dozen women. They are saying these three did have consensual sexual encounters with deshaun Watson after a massage, and it just does kind of bring up a really interesting, I don't know. I guess angle here because..