The NFL owners unanimously approved the sale of the Washington Commanders from Dan Snyder to Josh Harris for a record $6.05 billion on Thursday.
Shortly after the vote, the league released the findings of the Mary Jo White investigation into Snyder. As a result, Snyder was fined $60 million, which will go into the sale’s closing, per the NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero.
“After extensive investigation, we sustained both Tiffani Johnston’s allegation of sexual harassment by Mr. Snyder and Jason Friedman’s allegation of deliberate underreporting of NFL revenues by the Club to avoid its VTs sharing obligations. We found that the evidence was insufficient to demonstrate Mr. Snyder’s involvement in the calendar photo incident or the security deposit issues, and was inconclusive as to his personal participation in the club’s improper shielding of VTS revenues. In the course of the investigation, we also identified a variety of transactions and accounting entries, left unexplained by the Club, which raised a number of issues as to whether a significant portion of the revenues recorded were NFl-related revenues improperly shielded from VTS sharing.”
In essence, the league agreed that Snyder sexually harassed Tiffani Johnston, a former team employee, and agreed the Commanders withheld about $11 million from the league’s visiting team shared revenues.
However, the league did have enough evidence that Snyder was directly involved in a 2013 photoshoot of the team’s cheerleaders in Costa Rica.
The NFL picked Mary Jo White to lead its second investigation into Snyder and the team for workplace misconduct.
Beth Wilkinson led the first investigation, which started in July 2020 after more than a dozen employees made allegations against the organization.
Dan Snyder was unofficially suspended, giving up day-to-day operations of the team to his wife, Tanya. But the findings of Wilkinson’s report were not released publicly. Ultimately, the U.S. Congress opened an investigation of its own. That is when Johnston and Friedman testified to Congress in the spring of 2022, prompting the NFL to open a second investigation.
The investigation lasted over a year, but NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell vowed the findings would be released publicly. Snyder put the team up for sale in November. Harris emerged as the frontrunner with a large investors group, including NBA legend Magic Johnson.
White appeared at Thursday’s NFL owners’ meeting to brief the group on her findings before they voted to approve the sale of the commanders.
Goodell said afterward that Snyder’s $60 million fine resolved the findings of White’s investigation and “all outstanding matters.”
