Brady Posts His Defense On Facebook

With a lawsuit pending over his four-game suspension, Tom Brady took to Facebook to defend his position. He claims he destroyed his cellphone, as he usually does when he replaces it, after his attorneys told him he wouldn’t have to turn it over, and that he was never told he could be punished for failing to hand it over. He also claims he cooperated with the investigation thoroughly:

To try and reconcile the record and fully cooperate with the investigation after I was disciplined in May, we turned over detailed pages of cell phone records and all of the emails that Mr. Wells requested. We even contacted the phone company to see if there was any possible way we could retrieve any/all of the actual text messages from my old phone. In short, we exhausted every possibility to give the NFL everything we could and offered to go thru the identity for every text and phone call during the relevant time.

Will this defense hold up in court? According to ESPN’s Dan Graziano, that’s the reason why the decision took so long as it did: the league was lining its legal ducks in a row, as seen in the league’s immediate filing in federal court to uphold the suspension. And ESPN also reports the league was willing to go to one or two games if Brady admitted he didn’t cooperate and the ball boys did something wrong, but the NFLPA balked when they league refused to seal their records of the appeal (such as the destroyed cell phone).

On a related note, folks are already starting to compare Brady’s suspension with other Goodell suspensions, such as this four-game suspension for domestic violence:

Strap in: this ride’s far from over.

Read more at The Big Lead.

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