Deshaun Watson's Accusers Say NFL Investigators Have Been Working the 'Victim Blaming' Angle to Discredit Them

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For those of you scoring at home, Deshaun Watson is now up to 22 accusers. Licensed Massage Therapists or LMTs all telling similar to identical stories about Watson hiring them, grabbing them, and making them grab parts of him that are not in the LMTs Terms of Service. 

Obviously no one but Watson and his accusers know the full story. All we do know, is that all 23 of them are entitled to justice and due process. If you don't stand for that as a bedrock principle of this country, then what are we even doing here? We might as well just bend the knee to Queen Elizabeth and tell her to start moving her soldiers into our kids' rooms and search our houses for those paparazzi shots of Kate Middleton's butt. 

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According to Sports Illustrated, the accusers are saying they're getting the treatment they have a God-given right too by the Houston Police Department investigators. But from the NFL? Not so much. 

Source - Lauren Baxley, a 33-year-old licensed massage therapist who is also among the 22 plaintiffs suing Watson, spoke to SI in a separate interview, her first since filing suit. She says that Friel and Gaffney also asked her about what she was wearing during her June 2020 appointment with Watson. She perceived the overall tone of the league’s investigators as “patronizing” and “victim-blaming,” as she says they also questioned her response to Watson’s behavior, including why she froze and did not end the session. (Freezing, along with fight or flight, is a common physiological response to danger.) Baxley was the first of the plaintiffs to file a report with Houston police, on April 2, and says she was disappointed in the NFL’s handling compared with the adult sex crimes unit of Houston PD’s special victims division. 

“My forensic interview [with HPD] was very respectful and trauma-informed,” Baxley says. “They let me speak uninterrupted, whereas with Lisa Friel and the [other NFL investigator], they would cut me off, they would question things, they would circle back.” Baxley believes that they were “trying to trip me up. They didn’t, but they were really looking for the weaknesses that they thought they could exploit.”

The NFL did not make Friel or Gaffney available for interviews, saying it is the investigators’ policy not to comment during ongoing investigations. In an email, a league spokesperson wrote, “We are grateful to the women who came forward to share their experiences, and we recognize how difficult talking about these issues may be as we try to understand the facts of the matter.”

Again I repeat, Watson has a sacred right to due process. Innocent until proven guilty. That is not the issue here. The issue is that the pros at HPD: SVU are making every effort to respectfully glean the facts in testimony from women who claim they've been traumatized. While it sounds like Roger Goodell's goon squad is treating them like the sleazy defense lawyer in a Lifetime Original Movie. 

He didn't send in trained investigators to get to the bottom of whether or not one of his most marketable players is a secretly a serial creep. He doesn't want the truth at all. Because if the answer turns out to be some version of "yes," that's bad for business. So he sent in cleaners. People who'll cover up any possible evidence he's guilty by smearing the complaining witnesses as somehow to blame for being hired to give a client a rub down and - allegedly - getting a penis put in their hand instead. By suggesting they're confused, mistaken, careless, or worse, they were asking for it by the way they were dressed. Nice. 

So way to go, NFL. Good on you, Ginger Satan. Once again, proving what his true nature is. He's a guy who will do anything to make a problem go away, other than expose the truth, no matter how painful. And he doesn't care who he screws over in the process. Just remember this in November when the pink merchandise goes on sale and a tiny percentile of the profits goes to a breast cancer charity. The league doesn't give a deep fried fuck about helping women unless there's some money and good public relations in it.