Kahler: Deshaun Watson's return — 'You think you put us behind you, but we are still here' (2024)

It’s been a relief not to have to write about Deshaun Watson during the 11 weeks of his suspension. We didn’t see Watson every Sunday, and not to see him was not to think about him, at least not as much.

Amazon’s Week 3 prime-time broadcast danced around the reasons why the Browns quarterback was not at practice, nor on the sideline. ESPN didn’t in Week 8, when Joe Buck specifically mentioned the 26 lawsuits alleging Watson’s sexual misconduct during massage appointments.

Even though he was out of sight, Watson’s suspension wasn’t truly a break from the year-and-half-long saga — on Oct. 14, six games into the suspension, another woman filed a civil lawsuit alleging sexual misconduct.

Saga really isn’t the right word. It’s too small and flippant to properly summarize the serious, sprawling mess that has changed the lives of dozens of women, remade the identity of two NFL franchises and forced the league to once again confront the contradictions and inadequacies of its own disciplinary process.

Watson is returning to the field Sunday nearly two years since his last NFL game, but that’s hardly a reason to think that this is all over. Since Cleveland traded for Watson in March, when Browns GM Andrew Berry said he had enough information about the incidents to declare himself “confident in Deshaun the person,” Watson has been sued three more times.

Tony Buzbee, the attorney who represented the first 25 women to sue Watson, wouldn’t say how many women he’s spoken to with similar allegations who didn’t end up suing, but he did point out that in July, two weeks after he filed a lawsuit against the Texans for their role in enabling Watson’s behavior, the team resolved that lawsuit and 29 other claims — more than just the 25 women he represented in civil suits.

Lauren Baxley, the lone plaintiff of the original 25 women who did not settle her suit, wrote for the Daily Beast in August that she does not intend to settle. Buzbee told The Athletic that nothing has changed in Baxley’s stance.

“Watson still refuses to admit that he harassed and committed indecent assault against me,” Baxley wrote. “Any settlement offer he has made has been a dismissal of his evil actions, and I know that unless there is an authoritative intervention, he will continue his destructive behavior.”

The mountain of sexual misconduct allegations that piled up on Watson has been the biggest story in the NFL, but there were times during the last year and a half when it has also felt like a story with which no one knew how to deal. At Texans training camp in 2021, players and coaches would hardly even acknowledge the conspicuous absence of their star quarterback, their franchise cornerstone, who was not practicing yet still on the roster.

This summer, after former judge Sue L. Robinson issued her decision in which she said Watson violated the NFL’s personal conduct policy because he “engaged in sexual assault” and that “his conduct posed a genuine danger to the safety and well-being of another person,” Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski said he’d read the decision, but not one of four players I asked about it said they had.

After I asked a Browns player at the podium whether he’d read anything at all about the lawsuits against Watson, one local reporter told me something to the effect of, “Oh, we’ve tried that a million times. We’re all fatigued.” I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the players’ non-answers, or to my line of questioning.

I felt like I was beating my head against the wall in interviews, like I was speaking an entirely different language. But I understood why. No matter how teammates, coaches and others connected to the Browns feel about Watson, they still have to work with him — and most don’t have the job security to shield them from the consequences of their own honesty.

No players would admit to having read what the former judge had to say about their quarterback, but wouldn’t that be a valuable learning experience?

“That’s the place I come from too,” said Rita Smith, senior adviser to the NFL on matters of domestic violence and sexual assault. “Not reading it to do a gotcha or make a decision one way or the other, but to read the decision and see what errors might he have made that I could possibly make? What misunderstandings does he hold in his head that puts people in a place where they feel uncomfortable or felt threatened? Boy, if I can learn something about that, then I am going to be able to move in the world better for myself.”

A year and a half later, I’m left with a sinking feeling that there was a lot to learn from the allegations against Watson but nobody was all that interested in doing that learning. Watson certainly wasn’t — he gave a vague and clearly scripted apology during a Browns preseason pregame show only to reverse course in a news conference just six days later, after the NFL and NFLPA announced they’d settled on an 11-game suspension.

“I’ve always stood on my innocence and always said that I’ve never assaulted anyone or disrespected anyone and I will continue to stand on that,” he said.

That’s the last time we’ve heard from him.

Decision-makers in the NFL apparently weren’t all that interested in examining the allegations against Watson, either. Four teams — Atlanta, Carolina, Cleveland and New Orleans — all wanted to trade for Watson, with Cleveland winning out as the only team that would fully guarantee Watson’s contract. When the Browns traded for Watson, Buzbee told ESPN that no NFL teams had reached out to speak with him or his clients.

“I don’t think people took it seriously enough and I don’t think they were concerned enough,” said an NFL club executive familiar with the trade talks who was granted anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the subject. “I think it was brushed aside as just a fetish. ‘Oh yeah, everybody has their secret fetishes and that’s his.’”

That executive said when he saw how teams acted, he felt very alone in his concern about Watson’s pattern of behavior.

“Once they found out (he wouldn’t face) criminal charges, all these teams were like, ‘Oh OK, everything is copacetic then, let’s go get him,’” the executive said.

In Buzbee’s opinion, even Watson’s legal team, led by attorney Rusty Hardin, made the mistake of not taking the allegations seriously. In public appearances, Hardin was adamant that Watson’s accusers were lying, and Hardin and Watson had been consistently adamant that they wanted to clear his name and would not settle.

Buzbee said he tried to settle each case before he actually filed each lawsuit, but he was brushed off.

“I am not used to that,” Buzbee said. “ I don’t take cases that aren’t serious.”

In June, after more than a year of Watson’s protestations of innocence, the two sides settled 23 of the 24 lawsuits.

When Rita Smith heard that Robinson would be the arbitrator on Watson’s suspension, Smith immediately looked into her background. “What does she know about DV and sexual assault?” Smith asked. “What is her experience on these issues? ”

The answer is unclear. The arbitration firm Fedarb lists 14 different areas of expertise in Robinson’s bio, but neither domestic violence nor sexual assault are mentioned.

“I have done this work long enough, over 40 years now, to know that if you have an attorney or a judge in a courtroom where there is DV or SA being presented and they don’t understand the issues, they are going to make bad decisions,” Smith said. “They just are. I was not at all hopeful that she was going to get this right the first time out.”

When Smith read Robinson’s decision that landed on a six-game suspension, she realized her concerns were well founded. While Robinson decried Watson’s “egregious” and “predatory behavior,” she also classified the allegations against Watson as “non-violent sexual conduct.”

“She is so less informed than I even expected,” Smith said. “If she doesn’t understand that sexual violence, sexual harassment, sexual coercion can be violent — we’re not talking physical violence, we’re talking emotional and psychological violence — I have worked with a lot of rape victims, and the victims who had the hardest time recovering were the ones who had not (experienced) a completed assault. The threat was there and they might have gotten away, but what they thought in their head about what might have happened was so much bigger than what someone who survived had gotten through.

“The emotional trauma of having the control taken away from you about what happens to your body is massively violent, it’s just not physically violent.”

Smith said she gave that feedback to NFL senior VP of social responsibility Anna Isaacson, and she trusts that Isaacson passed it up to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

“If they are suggesting an arbiter for a contract dispute, they are going to have someone who is good at contract law,” Smith said. “It just makes sense that you have somebody that has experience in the core of the case you are trying to hear.”

Goodell appealed Robinson’s recommendation of a six-game suspension for Watson, pushing for a ban of at least one full season and appointing former New Jersey attorney general Peter C. Harvey — who as a federal prosecutor had expertise in matters of domestic violence and sexual assault — to preside over the appeal before the league and players association agreed to the 11-game suspension in August.

Smith first started conversations with the NFL in 1998, when she was the executive director for the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and saw the league as an important platform to help reach men with a message about allyship. In 2014, she was hired along with four others when the NFL created the social responsibility department after Ravens running back Ray Rice was caught on video punching his then-fiancée, knocking her unconscious and dragging her out of an elevator.

“It took forever for them to get to a place where they felt like they needed to address these issues differently,” Smith said. “Unfortunately it was a pretty horrific thing that got them to the table.”

Smith and the other advisers have monthly calls with the social responsibility department, and Watson was on the agenda throughout the NFL’s investigation and disciplinary process. Smith receives updates so she can inform advocates around the country who have an eye on the NFL, “hoping for changes that will start to fan out into other places of work.”

But as Smith watched the trade market for Watson develop, then result in a historic, fully guaranteed contract from the Browns, she saw another missed opportunity.

“They pulled him in at a time when it bolstered him instead of saying, ‘We are going to give you another chance, man, but you’ve got to do better,'” Smith said. “That would have been a much stronger message, not just for him but for other people, and that was not what happened.”

On Sunday, Watson will return to Houston to make his first NFL start since Jan. 3, 2021.

Watson is used to hostile environments and will likely be expecting a less-than-warm welcome from fans from his former team. But he’s never had to play a game in front of his accusers — until now.

Buzbee will be there, “bells and whistles on,” he said, and he’s invited all 25 women he’s represented in cases against Watson.

“I will be there to welcome Deshaun back to Houston,” Buzbee said.

He knows his clients each have their own feelings about going to the game. Several have responded that they aren’t interested in attending. But Buzbee said the women who plan to be there in the suite — around 10 have told him they will come — will send a clear message to Watson:

“You think you put us behind you, but we are still here.”

(Photo of Watson: Nick Cammett / Getty Images)