Authors: Jeff Benedict,Don Yaeger
While willing to talk under an agreement of confidentiality, almost all of them declined to have their accounts detailed in this book out of fear of their abusers. However, one victim, the former fiancÉe of current Minnesota Vikings running back Leroy Hoard, agreed to speak concerning her experience. As uncovered by the authors in Ohio police records, the story offers a graphic illustration of how NFL teams work to insulate players from criminal liability.
Before joining the Vikings in November of 1996, Leroy Hoard played five years for the Cleveland Browns. During that time, he and fiancÉe Debbie DuBois* lived together. According to DuBois, she endured repeated incidents of domestic violence, including being thrown through walls at their home and suffering beatings that required her to undergo plastic surgery on more than one occasion. This finally came to the attention of the Browns organization following a particularly violent episode. “I was trying to back out of the driveway, and he kicked out the passenger’s side window,” DuBois said. “The glass got stuck in my face and I went into shock.”
A couple of Hoard’s teammates who witnessed the incident went to the Browns’ coaching staff and recommended that Hoard get some help. Within days, Browns head coach Bill Belichick telephoned DuBois.
“Coach Belichick left a message on the answering machine with the name of Joe Janesz, the person who I was supposed to contact, the therapist,” said DuBois. “From that point on, Leroy and I attended therapy sessions for a year. The team let him leave right after practices for therapy on the days our sessions were scheduled.”
The therapist whom the Browns asked to counsel Hoard and DuBois was Joe Janesz from the Cleveland Clinic. Janesz was one of a small team of professionals from the clinic who were hired by Browns owner Art Modell to counsel players with drug and alcohol abuse problems beginning in the early 1980s. Janesz had extensive experience working with individuals suffering from alcohol and drug abuse.
DuBois had understood that she and Hoard were meeting with a domestic violence counselor who was trained in psychology. “The psychologist,” said DuBois in an interview for this book, “told me ‘This is Leroy’s lifestyle. He goes out every week and has to basically try to punish people on the field. He’ll go after them and try to kill them. A lot of times he can’t relate to coming home and not doing that to you when he’s upset.’
“I couldn’t accept that, because any human being knows the difference between tackling someone on the field and hitting the hell out of a woman,” said DuBois. “But Dr. Janesz was a team employee. The NFL accepts the fact that there is a major problem and they try to cover it up most of the time.”
When the authors contacted Joe Janesz at his Cleveland Clinic office in February of 1998, he explained that he was hired by the Browns to assist players with drug and alcohol problems. “Then we went to a broad-brush approach,” Janesz said in an interview for this book, “meaning that we began assisting players with any problem that presented itself and would impact the players’ quality of life and subsequently their quality of play. That included marital problems, aggressive disorders, anger disorders, anxiety disorders, and steroid abuse.”
Janesz acknowledged providing domestic violence counseling services for the Browns, and more specifically to having counseled DuBois and Hoard. Janesz was asked to explain what DuBois described above—specifically that she was told by him that Hoard would continue to abuse her because he was a man who played a violent game for a living. “I can’t comment on that,” Janesz told the authors. “It is moving to patient-client privilege. To indicate yes or no on that, I would be breaching her confidentiality.”
“The whole process was a very embarrassing situation for me,” DuBois said. “Everybody I was dealing with was in the NFL or had something to do with the NFL. They were all men and they were probably thinking, ‘Honey, you know you just have to leave him.’”
DuBois’s experience is not unique, as teams go to great lengths to protect players and their organizations from public scrutiny. “They [teams] try to internally police themselves before it [domestic violence] becomes public,” said Judge Ed Newman. “Police don’t get to the player. In effect, what management is doing is what was happening in the 1940s. They close the door. There was a man beating up his wife, everyone heard the screams, but they said it was a private matter. The NFL is in effect, at times, doing the same thing.”
Hoard’s therapy sessions with the Browns’ in-house drug and alcohol specialist did little to curb his violence at home. Finally, on February 1, 1996, DuBois called the police. That evening, Hoard broke down the couple’s bedroom door, entered the room, grabbed DuBois by the neck, and threw her across the room. The police report, obtained by the authors, noted that the bedroom door was broken. The front door to the house and the garage door were also broken.
“Tonight he told me he wanted me out of the house, unfortunately I had no money so I couldn’t leave,” DuBois said in a written statement to the police. “So he broke the door down, came upstairs, grabbed me by the neck and told me ‘Bitch, I want you out of my house.’ [He] threw me across the bed … [and told me] to get the f--- out of his house.”
Despite police intervention and the filing of a formal complaint by DuBois, this case, like all the preceding ones, went unreported in the press. Why? DuBois was too scared to press charges, thus the police never arrested Hoard and the media remained in the dark. DuBois did, however, place repeated phone calls to Browns owner Art Modell. “I left a few messages for Art Modell,” she said. “But there was no response. He didn’t return my calls.” Modell also declined an interview for this book.
According to DuBois, when the Browns learned that she had reported the incident to police and that a court-appointed lawyer was assigned to assist her, the team contacted the attorney and offered to settle the matter out of court—a strange proposal considering that DuBois had not even pressed charges.
“They didn’t want anything to hit the papers because Leroy was a major player, a star,” said DuBois. “And the public loved him. Obviously, people didn’t know what he was really like.”
O
n February 14, 1998, Hoard, while en route to a post-season vacation in Florida, drove through Ohio, where he still maintained a home. While in town, he located DuBois, who was then separated from him and seeing another man. A fight ensued and, according to a copy of the police log entry dated February 14, 1998, police were sent to the scene. The log reads: “Complaint: Male has a fire going and is throwing the female’s clothes into the fire.” The 911 call was placed at 3:29
A.M.
by DuBois’s brother, who was aware of his sister’s previous abuse at the hands of Hoard. Police responded to the scene, but no incident report was filed and Hoard was never arrested.
The police reported that they were unable to locate a fire upon their arrival, but there was a “verbal altercation” underway. “If there are signs of injury, our guys are instructed to make the arrest,” said Police Chief Bickan in an interview with the authors. “We like to make the arrest wherever possible in a domestic situation. The only thing that interferes with that is reluctance on the part of the combatants to file charges. It is very, very prevalent for people to call us in these situations but not want to follow through with charges.” Hoard was permitted to leave the state and continue on his way to Florida. DuBois, according to one of her friends, went into hiding. The authors were unable to speak with her after this point.
While the NFL insists that its players are subjected to unusual amounts of publicity when they are arrested, many incidents, like Hoard’s, do not result in an arrest and thus the press never hears of them. Fear and intimidation are major deterrents to filing criminal charges against abusive NFL players. Although predatory acts of domestic violence have become more familiar to the American public, such accounts hardly fit the image of a hero. As a result, women such as DuBois feel even less secure in taking their cases to the courts because they are rarely believed and remain exposed to further abuse.
“If I know a drug dealer who lives in an organized criminal entity,” suggested Bonnie Campbell, head of the U.S. Justice Department’s Violence Against Women Division, “and I go to a prosecuting attorney in New York, they’re going to say, ‘Well, will you testify against him?’ And if I say yes, the government will put me in a witness protection program, maybe for the rest of my life. I may have a whole new identity. Conversely, we do not offer protection to battered women. Instead, they are left exposed to ongoing danger and threats. Why shouldn’t they recant? We leave them out there at the mercy of someone who’s demonstrated over and over again a complete will to hurt someone by battering.”
One reason for the NFL’s attitude of denial rests in the explosive racial implications lurking beneath the surface. Consider the following: according to the authors’ research, over 90 percent of the NFL players who had been charged with domestic violence were black.
“That is a problem in getting at and around this issue because it seems to come out as an issue of racism,” said Campbell. She has worked directly with NFL director of player programs Lem Burnham and is familiar with the racial issues associated with the NFL and reports of domestic violence. “The NFL is very black and I think a lot of people are really afraid to look beyond for fear it looks not like athletes and violence, but race and violence. There is real resistance to delve into that in great depth on the part of African-American leaders, especially on the part of sports officials, who just don’t know how to handle the question ‘Is this about athletes or is it about black athletes?’”
Far from confronting the racial implications attached to frequent player arrests for domestic violence, the NFL uses race as a weapon to intimidate journalists, researchers, and policymakers who earnestly attempt to investigate and address the issue. For example, when Commissioner Tagliabue received Congressman Sanders’s January 1996 letter calling on the league to address repeated player arrests for abusing women, the NFL took three months to respond. When it finally answered the congressman, the league issued a veiled threat to charge him with racism if Sanders persisted.
In an April 19, 1996, letter obtained by the authors, the NFL senior vice president of communications and government affairs, Joe Brown, denied the existence of a domestic violence problem within the NFL, and insisted that any statements by Sanders to the contrary were inherently racist. “To single out athletes will unfavorably serve to perpetuate stereotypes—including as to ethnic and racial groups—that impair efforts to deal with these issues,” wrote Brown. The letter went on: “It will also unfairly stigmatize athletes by inevitably suggesting that they have a particular propensity to engage in such behavior when there is no basis for such an implication… We believe that any resolution on this subject selectively directed at athletes … is highly inappropriate and necessarily open to criticism as discriminatory.”
Ex-Miami Dolphin Liffort Hobley and former Cowboys security chief Larry Wansley, both of whom are black and very sensitive to the negative stereotypes that can be associated with this issue, have invested years counseling players who batter. And both see the NFL’s use of the race card as inappropriate and unnecessary. “If the league takes the position that by merely addressing the disproportionate number of black players being arrested you’re giving some sort of tacit credibility to the claim that this is racist, I think that’s irresponsible,” Wansley said in an interview with the authors. “That cop-out has been around for years. Yes, there have been examples of white players not getting the same media scrutiny after committing an equally heinous crime or act. But there’s always been this fascination with the cop-out: ‘This happened to me only because I’m black.’ I know from personal experience things that happened to me because I am indeed black, but that does not excuse this approach.”
After being apprised of the authors’ data on the disproportionate number of arrest reports for domestic violence among black players, Wansley said, “If someone brought me that kind of data, it would tell me that I really need to take a close look at this. There are some signals being sent that I don’t understand. But I’m going to make it my business to find out.”
The NFL declined the opportunity to review and respond to this information.
Hobley, who largely agreed with Wanlsey’s viewpoint, said: “Probably 65 percent of the professional athletes who come into the NFL have some background where someone in their family has had a problem with domestic violence. Seeing domestic violence at home and also seeing it from neighbors, friends, and teenagers who were older than you—it can have a carryover effect to your adult relationships. Primarily, minorities have had more problems with domestic violence because of our background or because of the environment that we grew up in.”
Wansley and Hobley pointed to the absence of father figures among black players as an important factor. “Fatherlessness is a common background trait,” Hobley said. “Usually, in this day and age it is prevalent in minority homes. I grew up the same way. My father left when I was a five-year-old.” Statistics and scholarly research support Hobley’s position. According to David Blanken-horn, author of
Fatherless America,
roughly 40 percent of the children in the United States live in homes where no father is present. That number climbs to 70 percent among blacks according to the U.S. Census Bureau. “Many males who turn to violence … grew up without a father,” wrote Blankenhorn. And criminal justice experts William Bennett, John J. Dilulio, and John P. Walters report that fatherlessness is disproportionately plaguing the black community.
Finally, life in the NFL can directly increase the likelihood that domestic violence problems will arise. “Mentally and emotionally, domestic violence is more prevalent throughout the entire NFL than anything because of the things that spouses and significant others have to deal with on a day-to-day basis,” explained Hobley. “Players are in such a limelight and there are so many different people, not only women, but men who tend to take a lot of time away from the family. It becomes a problem. We fail to understand the concept of family time, and tend to put off the things that we should be doing with our family and close friends. You feel like you’re more important than they are. We tend to not realize those things until it’s too late.”