During Thursday’s interview with #PFTPM, Commanders outside counsel John Brownlee made an offhand remark about owner Daniel Snyder’s defamation claim filed in India. The comment raised an obvious question.
Brownlee said that the Snyders “prevailed” in the action filed regarding the blatantly false story linking him to Jeffrey Epstein. At the time, I asked Brownlee what “prevailed” specifically meant.
“They were able to establish that those things were, in fact, false,” he said. “He wasn’t with Jeffrey Epstein. He wasn’t paying off referees. He wasn’t doing drugs. I mean, all of that stuff was shown to be false.”
In that same answer, Brownlee mentioned that one of the Commanders’ former limited partners was banned from ever participating in NFL ownership again. That person was, as PFT reported at the time, Dwight Schar.
“I mean, these were were really defamatory allegations made against Dan and the Snyder family,” Brownlee said. “They were not true. They had every legal right to try to disprove them, which they did.”
It still wasn’t clear how the Snyders had “prevailed” in the Indian defamation action. A Commanders spokesman told PFT early Saturday morning that the court in India issued an order requiring the story in question to be removed, and that the case remains pending.
Per this article, the order was issued in August 2020. According to the spokesperson, the defendant complied with the order to remove the article.
So, eventually, there will -- or won’t -- be a settlement or a verdict or a judgment in the lawsuit. Either way, it remains active.
