Eighteen years ago, on the Friday of the Super Bowl off week, Steve Tisch created a far more benign news cycle. He was on the phone predicting that his New York Giants would upset the 18-0 New England Patriots of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not going to give you the score,\u201d Tisch told me back then. \u201cWe\u2019ll have more points than they do. That\u2019s my score.\u201d<\/p>\n
And sure enough, the Oscar-winning producer of \u201cForrest Gump\u201d and relatively new NFL owner called that epic 17-14 Giants victory in Super Bowl 42. Tisch had more of a Hollywood style than John Mara, the reserved statesman, but he was committed to making their partnership nearly as blissful as the one forged by their late fathers, Wellington Mara and Bob Tisch. In those days, when the Maras and Tisches each owned 50 percent of the franchise (multibillionaire Julia Koch recently bought a 10 percent stake), the filmmaker called their shared ownership the most unique management structure in sports.<\/p>\n
\u201cA situation like that can be very dysfunctional and very disruptive,\u201d Steve Tisch said. \u201cWe pay close attention to how it can start to unravel, and neither I nor John want it to unravel.\u201d<\/p>\n
Which brings us to this Friday of this Super Bowl off week, when news broke that connected Steve Tisch to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who, according to emails that were among more than three million documents released by the Department of Justice, helped the Giants co-owner meet multiple women. Epstein described Tisch as a \u201cshared interest friend\u201d in a story first reported by The Athletic<\/a>.<\/p>\n A story that could make an ownership group unravel.<\/p>\n Tisch was communicating with Epstein in 2013, five years after the wealthy financier pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from an underage girl. In one email, Tisch asked Epstein if a particular woman was a \u201cworking girl.\u201d In another email, Tisch asked Epstein if a woman was a \u201cpro or civilian.\u201d In yet another email, the co-owner asked the financier, \u201cIs my present in NYC?\u201d After Epstein responded in the affirmative, Tisch said, \u201cCan I get my surprise to take me to lunch tomorrow?\u201d<\/p>\n They spoke about women in crude, vulgar, objectifying terms, and the disclosures sure should have brought considerable shame to Tisch, the Giants, and the NFL. But in a statement released by the Giants after the revelations, Tisch missed the point. \u201cWe had a brief association where we exchanged emails about adult women, and in addition, we discussed movies, philanthropy, and investments,\u201d Tisch said in the statement. \u201cI did not take him up on any of his invitations and never went to his island. As we all know now, he was a terrible person and someone I deeply regret associating with.\u201d<\/p>\n On Aug. 10, 2019, Epstein killed himself in his Manhattan jail cell while facing additional charges in federal court of sex-trafficking minors after he allegedly exploited and abused dozens of underage girls in New York and Florida. Tisch\u2019s name had never been linked to Epstein until the Friday report. No evidence connected Tisch to any interaction with underage girls.<\/p>\n The Giants co-owner is hardly the first rich and powerful man (or not-so-rich and not-so-powerful man) to discuss apparent prostitution with an associate, and he won\u2019t be the last. But still, even if he wasn\u2019t aware that he was dealing with an alleged human trafficker who had already been convicted of a sex crime, Tisch showed such a staggering lack of judgment here that he needs to pay a price for it. Ignorance is not a sufficient defense. Ever.<\/p>\n In the world of pro football, accountability is a word and concept tossed around as freely as a used towel in a locker room. It seems easily applied to players like Deshaun Watson<\/a> and Justin Tucker<\/a>, who were alleged to have engaged in off-field misconduct, and less so when it comes to owners.<\/p>\n Though Daniel Snyder<\/a> and Jerry Richardson<\/a> sold their Washington and Carolina franchises while facing investigations into workplace misconduct \u2014 Snyder was fined $60 million, and Richardson was fined $2.75 million as their sales of the Commanders and Panthers closed \u2014 the league did not discipline Patriots owner Robert Kraft<\/a>, despite the embarrassment caused by his 2019 massage parlor arrest (solicitation charges were later dropped). Panthers owner David Tepper<\/a>, with a net worth of $20 billion, was fined only $300,000 for throwing a drink at Jaguars fans. Steelers wide receiver DK Metcalf<\/a> was docked two games and $555,000 in salary and nearly lost $45 million (the Steelers rightfully declined to void that guaranteed money in his contract) for grabbing a heckler who had taunted him.<\/p>\n The NFL\u2019s personal conduct policy has traditionally included language that stated club and league ownership and management officials are \u201cheld to a higher standard and will be subject to more significant discipline\u201d for violations of that policy. Whether or not the NFL regularly honors those words, the 76-year-old Tisch should be fined, suspended and prohibited from participating in any team or league activities for some period of time.<\/p>\n As a guardian of a public trust \u2014 the New York Giants \u2014 Tisch let down a lot of people, including his business partner since 2005. John Mara is courageously battling cancer, and in the immediate wake of his successful recruitment of John Harbaugh, this development was the last thing he needed to deal with. Mara has long been one of the NFL\u2019s most respected figures, in part because he always looks for reasons to keep people instead of reasons to discard them. He is expected to give his partner a ton of grace here.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Tisch should really sit in front of a mirror and ask himself if he\u2019s still fit to be the team\u2019s chairman and executive vice president, or if it would be a better idea to step aside and turn over those titles to his siblings Jonathan and Laurie, who both sit on the board of directors.<\/p>\n Steve Tisch has done good work over the years, inside and outside the game, including what the Giants called \u201cthe single largest donation from an individual to a medical center for a concussion-related initiative.\u201d But this offense \u2014 becoming the latest power broker to have gotten too close to Jeffrey Epstein \u2014 should not be dismissed in the hope that it gets lost in all of next week\u2019s Super Bowl noise.<\/p>\n More than anyone in the NFL, owners need to be held accountable. Even 13 years after the fact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eighteen years ago, on the Friday of the Super Bowl off week, Steve Tisch created a far more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":721346,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2067],"tags":[7,519,1917,56,2321,2469,6,320,156],"class_list":{"0":"post-721345","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-giants","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-giants","10":"tag-new-york","11":"tag-new-york-giants","12":"tag-newyork","13":"tag-newyorkgiants","14":"tag-nfl","15":"tag-opinion","16":"tag-sports-business"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115995279767405012","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=721345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/721346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=721345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=721345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=721345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}