Washington state sheriff John Urquhart criticized the NFL on Thursday for how it handled information requests into the domestic violence case against New York Giants kicker Josh Brown.
The sheriff’s office released documents on Wednesday, Oct. 19, of an incident Brown had with his wife Molly in May 2015. Brown hasn’t faced charges for the incident. Molly Brown told police that he was physically violent with her more than 20 times in the last several years. In the documents that were released Brown claims to have a porn addiction and said that he’s been abusive to women since the age of 7. In a journal entry Brown wrote that he has abused his wife and that she filed for divorce because he was abusive, according to ESPN.
The NFL said on Thursday that repeated attempts to obtain information on Brown were denied by the sheriff’s office.
"NFL investigators made repeated attempts -- both orally and in writing -- to obtain any and all evidence and relevant information in this case from the King County Sheriff's Office. Each of those requests was denied and the Sheriff's Office declined to provide any of the requested information, which ultimately limited our ability to fully investigate this matter,” the NFL said in a statement.
Urquahart told Seattle radio station KIRO that they never received a written request from anyone claiming to be from the NFL and four days after the Brown investigation was open he received a public disclosure request from Robert Agnew from a generic email address, according to Pro Football Talk. He got another request from Agnew months later but Agnew didn’t state his affiliation.
"Nowhere on the request does he say that he works for the NFL and so, we don’t know that it’s the NFL and we’re not gonna give it out anyway, so we denied it,” Urquhart told KIRO. “… To our discredit, perhaps, we didn’t use the Google, to Google this guy’s name. Turns out that he is a security representative based in Seattle for the NFL. But he never told us that. The NFL never told us that. At no time has the NFL ever filed a written request – public disclosure request – for any of these files. Period. It’s never happened.”
Urquhart said that if the league had gone through the proper channels he would have told them that they couldn’t release the case files because the case was open but would have told them a little bit about what they had. He also said that he doesn’t like being pushed around by a bully.
Brown, who re-signed with the Giants in the offseason, was suspended one game this season for the incident in May 2015. He was placed on the commissioner’s exempt list on Friday. Brown did not travel with the team to London for Sunday’s game against the Los Angeles Rams.