Warren Moon is Accused of Drugging and Molesting His 32-Year-Old Assistant
Retired NFL quarterback Warren Moon has been sued for sexual harassment by his former assistant, Wendy Haskell. Read the lawsuit here: https://t.co/u6BjTgAX8n pic.twitter.com/LqeU78J88p
— Tom Cleary (@tomwcleary) December 7, 2017
.
Washington Post – A California woman who worked for a sports marketing firm led by Hall of Fame quarterback Warren Moon filed a sexual harassment lawsuit alleging that the retired football star required her to wear thong underwear and share his bed during business trips.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in Orange County, Calif., also alleges that Moon, 61, committed sexual battery by grabbing the woman’s crotch during a trip to Seattle this year. The suit further accuses Moon of pulling off the woman’s bathing suit after slipping a drug into her drink during a separate trip to Mexico in October. …
The plaintiff, Wendy Haskell, 32, was hired as Moon’s executive assistant in July and traveled with him on a weekly basis for speaking engagements, charity events and personal appearances, according to the lawsuit. She alleges that she was demoted by the firm in October after she complained about Moon’s sexual advances. …
According to the new lawsuit, Moon required Haskell to stay in his hotel room during business trips, sleep in the same bed and wear “skimpy thong lingerie bottoms” as nightclothes. When she protested, he replied that she had to comply to keep her job and said that “his prior assistant accepted the same arrangement,” the lawsuit states.
Haskell declined to comment through her attorney, Diana L. Fitzgerald of Miami. The Washington Post does not ordinarily name alleged victims of sexual assault, but Fitzgerald said her client had agreed to go public.
It was only a matter of time before the #MeToo movement spread to the sports world. The Category 1 storm that was Harvey Weinstein picked up power as it hit the rest of Hollywood, was upgraded to a Category 3 as it started leveling the news industry and again to a Category 4 as it made its inevitable storm track toward Washington.
Now finally, it’s made landfall in the world of ath-a-letics. And you wonder why it took so long. By their very nature, sports attracts testosterone-fueled, Alpha Male man-children with arrested development and the entitlement that comes from getting special treatment your whole life. So it’s a minor miracle that in this environment, this great cosmic balancing of the Sexual Harassment Force, that so far all we’ve gotten is Gregg Zaun and now Warren Moon.
And as far as Moon being accused, you can say all the usual qualifiers about presumption of innocence and all that, but he’s hardly a great candidate for getting the benefit of the doubt. He’s got a sketchy history that includes being accused of trying to buy sex off a cheerleader when he was with the Vikings (a case he settled out of court). And he went on trial in Texas for slapping and choking his wife but beat the rap when she told the jury the fight was her fault. So yeah, it’s not a huge stretch to believe that he’d slip an employee the Hot Cosby and make her spoon with him wearing a thong. Especially when Wendy Haskell is willing to put her name out there and put up with the shitstorm of troll abuse any accuser exposes themselves too.
The goddamned shame of it is that Warren Moon should have been one of the all time feel-good success stories. An instructive tale that old football fans could use to teach their kids about the power of Not Giving Upness and Believing in Yourselfism. Moon was ignored by the NFL during a time when the stigma of being a black quarterback was still a thing. He went north and proved himself by breaking Canadian football winning five straight championships. Then made to to real football, quarterbacked until he was 44 and got into Canton. That should be a positive life lesson. But instead he’s a punchline. Just another aging creep abusing his power over someone so he can jerk off about it later. Sad.
Now we wait for the next athletic shoe to drop. And it will. It’s inevitable. A storm is coming, Mr. Moon. You and your friends better batten down the hatches.