Clay Travis - Fri Mailbag Perspective on DW4 Situation

Apr 16, 2021, 6:32 PM

Subscriber Question: “Is it possible that Deshaun Watson demanded a trade earlier this year thinking if he moved, the lawsuits wouldn’t follow him? He couldn’t possibly be that dumb, still…”]

Clay Travis Perspective:
"I don’t think that was the reason Watson demanded a trade. I think his feelings were hurt over how the Texans went about hiring their new general manager and coach. As the franchise quarterback, I think he believed he should have been consulted on these hires and when he wasn’t, he pouted. Demanding a trade was just evidence he was caught up in his feelings.

I don’t think it had anything to do with the sexual assault allegations.

The bigger issue here is this: Deshaun Watson got disastrous advice from his agent, lawyers, and sports representatives when the initial demand for payment from the first masseuse arrived from plaintiff’s attorney Tony Buzbee. For $100,000, Watson could have made this entire story go away.

Given that he’s presently signed to a $156 million contract and stands to make hundreds of millions more from future deals in his career, that settlement’s a rounding error for him. He should have negotiated a settlement to make this first case go away.

I understand that Watson may have believed he’d done nothing wrong, but you can’t tell me that he could have been having hundreds of massages, mostly from different women, and none of his representatives knew this was going on or that it was a risk for him once the first complaint arrived. Given the frequency and volume of these massages, it would have been virtually impossible for him to hide. Now they may not know what was going on during the massages, but let’s be honest, this is strange behavior. Something was up here, just based on the sheer volume of massages Watson was getting.

Put it this way: how many 25-year-old men do you know who are getting around 120 or 150 massages a year? I mean, that’s an absolutely insane number of massages. Most people don’t even go to the gym that many days in a year. And if an athlete really needed that many massages for therapeutic reasons, especially during COVID, they are likely going to the same masseuse over and over again.

It doesn’t take a genius to believe that Watson was after something other than a therapeutic massage. So Watson’s representatives needed to have an uncomfortable conversation with him when the first allegation arrived. And even if he claimed he’d done nothing wrong, they needed to consider and explain to him what would happen the moment this first woman went public and advised him to settle. It’s worth $100k, way more than that, in fact, just to have this first accusation never go public.

That’s especially the case because any good advisor would have immediately realized that once one woman went public, there was a decent chance, given the fact Watson was having over a hundred massages a year from a wide variety of women, that eventually other women were going to go public too. In other words, once the first accusation was made, it was eminently foreseeable what would happen next — that other women would see the first woman had come forward and there was a strong likelihood others would follow. That first lawsuit effectively acted as an advertisement for other women.

So you needed to prevent that first advertisement from ever going public.

Yes, Watson should have been smarter than to put himself in this situation, but this is just awful management by Watson’s advisors. They could have potentially eliminated any of these stories ever coming out for $100k, and now Watson’s entire career is in danger. I mean, seriously, he could end up in jail over these issues. Not to mention, he’s going to have to pay, at the absolute minimum, tens of millions of dollars to settle all these cases now.

He should fire everyone who advises him for being awful at their jobs.

And if I were advising him now, I’d tell him to pay whatever it takes to settle these cases now and pray that keeps these women from deciding to cooperate any more fully than they already have with the Houston police. Because once criminal charges are filed, and I think that could happen sooner rather than later, Watson is in even more legal jeopardy.

Forget playing football. Watson could end up in prison for years, if he’s not careful here.

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Clay Travis - Fri Mailbag Perspective on DW4 Situation

So if he settles with the first accuser for 100k,

Re: So if he settles with the first accuser for 100k,

Talking about giving bad advice...

This answer seems pretty reasonable from Travis

When you play

Very reasonable response from Clay..

Exactly

Why was that advice bad, specifically?***

Paying 22 women 100K is still a Hell of a lot cheaper than

Re: Paying 22 women 100K is still a Hell of a lot cheaper than

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