The judge in Jon Gruden’s $150 million lawsuit against the NFL and Roger Goodell has run out of patience with the former Las Vegas Raiders coach. At a recent hearing in Nevada’s Eighth Judicial District Court in Las Vegas, District Judge Joe Hardy said, “We have no reason to trust representations by Mr. Gruden,” after Gruden’s side gave several different accounts of a phone the league wants examined.
Hardy also ordered Gruden to pay some of the NFL’s attorney fees for the dispute and warned that more could follow. Legal analyst Michael McCann obtained the hearing transcript and published the exchanges on Tuesday.
“Where’s the BlackBerry?”
The phone in question is a BlackBerry that, in Hardy’s words, “may or may not have ever existed.” The league asked for it as part of its search of Gruden’s devices, and the judge said he had been told at different times that it belonged to Gruden, that it belonged to Gruden’s son, and that there was no such phone.
“Where’s the BlackBerry?” Hardy asked Gruden’s attorney, Adam Hosmer-Henner. “There’s no BlackBerry,” Hosmer-Henner replied, adding that “there never was a BlackBerry.” Asked whether his client had lied to him, the lawyer said: “It’s not a lie, Your Honor, it’s a mistake.” Gruden had told him about an old BlackBerry he could not turn on, which later “actually turned out to be an iPhone that was used by” his son.
“I’m kind of at a loss. I don’t understand, you know, what is happening,” Hardy said, also reminding both sides that they are in discovery “because this is what [Gruden] wanted.”
The White House, smart TVs and missing emails
Hosmer-Henner said Gruden had flown home from an event at the White House the same night so the NFL’s chosen forensic examiners could go through his devices. Hardy was not impressed. He said Gruden’s side kept suggesting the former coach was “super important and super special” and that the court should work around his schedule.
The two sides also argued over how far the device list should go. Hosmer-Henner complained that the league wanted every smart TV Gruden had owned in 15 years listed in his answers. NFL attorney Laura O’Boyle said the league was happy to leave out smart TVs and doorbell cameras, as long as it knew what was being left out. She accused Gruden of “delaying discovery and giving us half answers,” and said the league learned in late August that every email Gruden sent or received before 2025 was gone and that text messages appeared to be missing too. The NFL also wants his server imaged and access to his social media accounts.
Five years of litigation
Gruden resigned as Raiders coach in October 2021 after emails he wrote between 2011 and 2018 to former Washington team president Bruce Allen, most of them while he was working as a television analyst, were published. They contained racist, misogynistic and homophobic language, along with harsh criticism of Goodell. The emails had turned up during the league’s investigation of the Washington franchise’s workplace culture. Gruden walked away from about $60 million left on his contract.
His lawsuit, filed in Nevada in November 2021, says Goodell or someone in his office leaked the emails to two national newspapers to force him out, interfering with his Raiders contract. The NFL denies leaking anything. It also argues the theory makes no sense: if Goodell had wanted Gruden gone, he could have used his power under the league constitution to cancel the contract.
So far Gruden has won the procedural fights, most importantly the one over whether the case belongs in open court instead of private arbitration under Goodell. None of that has tested the merits. Hardy, who earlier ruled for Gruden and against the NFL on letting the case go forward, already scolded his side in August for “delays and lack of cooperation” and gave him seven days to produce documents.
What comes next
The lawyers are due back before Hardy in November. Trial is scheduled to start on May 24, 2027. The league’s position in its filings is blunt: “The NFL Parties did not leak any emails, and Gruden’s claims are baseless as a matter of both fact and law.” Goodell, who took questions at the owners’ fall meeting last week, is a named defendant alongside the league.
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