The Dolphins fired offensive line coach Jim Turner just before this years combine after he was implicated for harassing behavior toward multiple Dolphins players in the report filed following Ted Wells’s investigation into bullying in the organization.
Turner did not land another job in the NFL this season and told Adam Schefter of ESPN that he’s “angry I’m sitting on the couch.” He also told Schefter that he hired attorney Peter Ginsberg to do his own investigation into the allegations against him. Ginsberg, who has also represented Jonathan Vilma and Kevin and Pat Williams in disputes with the league, compiled a 25-page report on his findings.
Schefter reports that the report explains how Turner tried to help tackle Jonathan Martin and why he bought Christmas gifts like inflatable sex dolls for players. Those details aren’t shared, but the conclusion to the report is and it comes as little surprise to learn that it finds Turner was wrongly tarred as a bad guy.
“Coach Turner is a good man and a great coach with an excellent reputation among his players. It would be wrong for that reputation to be unfairly tarnished by the events leading up to and following Martin’s departure from the Dolphins. During those difficult times Coach Turner was, as he has been throughout his career, a caring and supportive colleague to the people with whom he worked,” the report reads. “Coach Turner, perhaps more than any other person, gave support and advice to Martin at a time when Martin seems to have been plagued by an internal turmoil which in large part remains a mystery. The Wells Report is off-target in the aim it takes at Coach Turner, and a good and decent person should not be tarnished as a result.”
Turner’s reputation has been tarnished, in part because he answered questions about those Christmas gifts by claiming he didn’t remember giving offensive lineman Andrew McDonald an inflatable male sex doll as part of ongoing jokes about McDonald being homosexual. Releasing a report explaining those gifts admits that wasn’t true and gives further credence to the investigators’ belief that Turner was not truthful with them at several other points and it seems fair that he might have to answer to potential future employers why he wasn’t truthful in answering questions asked at the behest of his previous employers.
