ESPN commentator and former NFL player Michael Irvin responded to sexual harassment charges made by the Marriott hotel chain with a $100 million lawsuit alleging defamation. The suit was filed in Texas, but on Monday, he dropped that suit and is refiling the same charges in Arizona.
Irvin’s legal team says that the Texas filing was voluntarily closed because the Marriott chain has divulged more details and evidence in the Phoenix-based case, the Dallas Morning News reported.
Irvin’s attorney Levi McCathern said that the hotel chain finally released the video of Irvin’s encounter with a Marriott employee who claims the ESPN broadcaster engaged in unwanted sexual overtures in the hotel lobby days before the Super Bowl in Phoenix.
In Phoenix, U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant scolded Marriott for taking so long to hand the video over to Irvin’s attorneys and ruled that Irvin is allowed to release the video to the public.
Indeed, Judge Mazzant blasted Marriott’s lag time in handing over the video, saying, “It seems like Marriott just looked at my order and didn’t want to produce the video.”
Irvin’s team claims the video proves he didn’t do anything untoward. “I think people need to see the video and judge it for themselves,” McCathern said last Friday.
But Marriott disagrees. The chain’s filing says Irvin “appeared to be visibly intoxicated” when talking with the employee and made comments about having sex with him.
Marriott also claims that another employee spoke to Irvin after the victim walked away, adding, “After Irvin finished leering at the Victim and turned back to Employee 1, he said aloud ‘she bad,’ ‘she bad…’” followed by another sexual remark.
They say he then “slapped himself in the face three times, saying ‘keep it together Mike.’”
This all started just ahead of the Feb. Super Bowl when ESPN benched Sunday NFL Countdown commentator Irvin after a Marriott hotel worker made her claims of sexual harassment.
The cable network quickly took Irvin off its Super Bowl broadcast team after the hotel worker made her accusations.
The hotel chain immediately told Irvin he was no longer welcome there and informed ESPN of its decision to boot the ex-Cowboys star from his room. Then, ESPN told Irvin he was not going to broadcast from the Super Bowl.
The hotel claims that the hotel worker — who has not been publicly named — said, “Irvin… asked the Victim whether she knew anything about having a ‘big Black man inside of [her],” Marriott said last Friday.
The former NFL player immediately proclaimed his innocence and said he didn’t even remember what he had said to the woman.
“Honestly, I’m a bit baffled with it all,” Irvin told the hosts of the Shan & RJ show on 105.3 the Fan in Dallas on Feb. 8 after being booted from the hotel.
“This all happened in a 45-second conversation in the lobby,” he continued. “When I got back after going out … I came into the lobby, and I talked to somebody. I talked to this girl. I don’t know her, and I talked to her for about 45 seconds. We shook hands. Then, I left. … That’s all I know.”
He later went further and blasted the hotel for perpetrating a “lynching” against him.
“This sickens me,” Irvin said on March 8. “Because in this great country this takes me back to a time where a white woman would accuse a black man of something, and they would take a bunch of guys that were above the law, run into the barn, put a rope around his foot, and drag him through the mud and hang him by the tree.”
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