The lawyers for Brian Flores say a recruiting memo used by the Las Vegas Raiders while considering the Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator for their head-coaching job is evidence that teams are retaliating against him for filing a racial discrimination lawsuit and that discriminatory hiring practices remain in place across the NFL.
The document that the NFL and search firm Korn Ferry hoped would remain sealed became public Tuesday after the magistrate judge overseeing the discovery process in Flores’s class-action lawsuit previously rejected Korn Ferry’s arguments to keep the document confidential.
The Korn Ferry document, as first reported by Front Office Sports, presents two columns under the heading, “Brian Flores — Strengths and Weaknesses”
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Among the Flores weaknesses, per Korn Ferry:
Flores attorney Michael Willemin told FOS some of these descriptions conjure the image of an “angry Black man.”
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Even one of the six positive points that Korn Ferry credits to Flores can be questionable in a discrimination suit because it paints Flores as someone who learned to speak and present himself positively because he got to meet rich White people despite being reared in a tough predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhood.
The law firms representing Flores, Wigdor LLP and Elefterakis, Elefterakis & Panek, issued a statement on Tuesday about the Korn Ferry memo:
“The recently unsealed documents demonstrate two unfortunate, but unsurprising, realities,” the statement reads. “First, that Mr. Flores’ decision to hold the league and its teams accountable for systemic race discrimination has been met with unlawful retaliation.
“Second, discrimination continues to play a significant role in the hiring process for NFL Head Coaches, as evidenced by the fact that the candidate profile prepared for the Raiders leans heavily on racial stereotypes. We and Mr. Flores are committed to eradicating the institutional racism and retaliation that permeates the league, its teams and their partners.”
The memo in question was prepared by Korn Ferry for the Las Vegas Raiders before the team’s most recent coaching search that ultimately resulted in Klint Kubiak being hired.
Flores was not interviewed by the Raiders.
Flores, who is Black, sued the NFL and its 32 teams in February 2022, specifically naming the Miami Dolphins, Denver Broncos and New York Giants. He alleged that the league’s hiring practices were “rife with racism” toward Black coaches. He was later joined in the lawsuit by fellow Black coaches Steve Wilks and Ray Horton.
Flores, who coached the Dolphins from February 2019 to January 2022, alleges in his suit that the Dolphins defamed him.
If the Korn Ferry reference to Flores being “the worst hiring decision we’ve ever made” is shown to be from a Dolphins executive, that could be used to prove the defamation claim.
It should be noted, however, that truth can serve as a partial defense in a racial discrimination suit.
And while he was coaching the Dolphins, Flores indeed hired and fired multiple assistants, often from one year to the next, while others left after a short time because personalities and opinions clashed.
Flores also had incidents in which he angrily yelled at staffers and executives, which painted him within the Dolphins organization as someone who sometimes demeaned people.
