After former Cardinals executive Terry McDonough filed an arbitration claim against the team, the team responded with a howitzer of personal attacks that, as we opined at the time, was unbecoming to the team and the league. Those comments have now become part of an expanded case against the Cardinals.
Via Tisha Thompson of ESPN.com, McDonough has amended his arbitration claim against the Cardinals, arguing that the organization’s response to McDonough’s original claim amounts to defamation and invasion of privacy.
The arbitration claim is being handed by Jeffrey Mishkin, who was given the assignment by the league.
“We are aware of the amended complaint and remain confident in our position,” the Cardinals said in a statement, per Thompson. “We are precluded from commenting further based on an existing confidentiality order that binds all parties.”
That’s a new development, one that could have avoided this specific aspect of the situation if it had been in place sooner. Both McDonough and the Cardinals had plenty to say about the situation in the early days of the case. Mishkin has since activated the “secret” part of the “secret, rigged kangaroo court,” the term we use to refer to an arbitration process that one of the parties to the process controls.
McDonough’s amended filing calls the team’s attacks on him “untrue and reprehensible.”
McDonough likely could have made these new claims in a civil lawsuit against the Cardinals, since the behavior happened after he was fired and likely falls well beyond the scope of the claims that can be forced into arbitration. Ir’s somewhat surprising that he didn’t.
It’s not surprising that McDonough’s new filing explains that he intends to file a civil lawsuit against Jim McCarthy, the external P.R. advisor who actually issued the allegedly defamatory statements, and his company, CounterPoint Strategies.