re: Benson settlement reached.

Did NFL, NBA pressure Benson to settle lawsuit?

Posted by Mike Florio on June 21, 2016, 10:52 PM EDT

NBC Sports

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Late last week, only days before a trial was due to commence involving the ownership of the NFL’s Saints and the NBA’s Pelicans, the case (like many civil actions do on the eve of opening statements) settled. Obviously, one of the benefits of settling the case came from keeping secret financial information about the two teams. (Another benefit came from keeping 88-year-old Tom Benson from testifying under oath, again. In another piece of litigation, he suggested without plausible evidence that his estranged heirs were trying to kill him.)

When I first noticed earlier on Tuesday a link from Jeff Duncan of the New Orleans Times-Picayune to a report from the San Antonio Express-News that the NFL and NBA pressured Benson to settle the case “in secret,” I was intrigued. So I clicked. I then found, however, that the article from the Express-News contains roughly the same amount of hard, concrete evidence as did Benson’s claim that his heirs wanted to hasten his death.

The first paragraph, for example, claims that the NFL and the NBA “pressured billionaire Tom Benson to keep secret the details” of the settlement. No sourcing is connected to the assertion. Besides, virtually every civil settlement is resolved with a confidentiality agreement. That’s one of the things that the party paying money or otherwise giving something of value gets in exchange for wrapping up the case. The fact that civil lawsuits habitually are resolved with a confidentiality agreement doesn’t support an assertion, as a matter of hard news, that the NFL and the NBA actually pressured Benson to keep the details of the settlement secret. In this case, he surely was going to do it anyway.

Of course, the article suggests that the pressure came from more than simply keeping the settlement secret. The NFL and the NBA, according to the report, also pressured Benson to settle.

“The leagues, which both still need to sign off on the deal, wanted Benson to wrap up the case before sensitive team data was publicly disclosed in a trial was set to begin June 20 in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, according to people involved with or following the case,” the article states in the second paragraph. And I’m now really confused.

Is the assertion that the NFL and NBA wanted the case to be settled before the disclosure of “sensitive team data” based on information from “people involved with” the case or information from people “following the case”? The use of “or” allows the statement to be technically accurate — but nevertheless extremely flimsy — if it’s ultimately based only on people “following the case.”

I’m following the case, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the NFL and the NFL wanted the case to go away before financial information became public. But I don’t know that to be a fact, and no one simply “following” the case would know that to be a fact, either.

Former San Antonio Mayor Phil Hardberger, who apparently was following the case but there’s no suggestion in the article that he was involved with it, told the Express-News that the leagues “did not want all their business dealings to become fodder for public conversation,” and that keeping the information secret was Benson’s motivation to settle. The opinions of Hardberger, a former federal judge, carry some weight. That doesn’t mean he actually knows that pressure actually was applied.

Likewise, a law professor who told the Express-News that “Tom Benson was under a lot of pressure from the NFL and the teams” to settle has no apparent proof that pressure was being applied.

Would it be a surprise to learn that both the NFL and the NBA pressured Benson to settle the case and to keep the terms secret, even if he would have done so anyway? No. But without someone telling a media outlet, on or off the record, that pressure actually was applied, there should be no “report” that it occurred. Instead, the article should have been written as opinion or analysis, not as news.

To summarize, there’s no clear evidence that the NFL or the NBA pressured Benson to settle. And there’s also no clear evidence (or even an assertion in the article) that Benson settled the case directly as a result of any such pressure.

But if the article contained that kind of disclaimer, who would have clicked on it? Not me.

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