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The Woman Who Shaped the NFL's Domestic Violence Defense

(Bloomberg) -- At the Super Bowl on Sunday the talk will be of the
Patriots’ offense, the Seahawks’ defense and deflated footballs. It won’t
be of domestic violence.

How the National Football League managed to defuse the crisis can be traced
in part to a woman -- 57-year-old Cynthia Hogan, a little-known yet
plugged-in Washington insider. A former aide to Joe Biden both in the
Senate and White House, Hogan was hired by the NFL as its Washington
lobbyist just days after the video surfaced of running back Ray Rice
beating his girlfriend in an elevator.

She met dozens of times with lawmakers and aides last fall, helping to
deflect potentially embarrassing hearings on Commissioner Roger Goodell and
even a threat to the NFL’s tax treatment.

In one meeting last October, Hogan met with the staffs of California
Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, who were demanding that
players be ousted permanently for domestic violence offenses. The two
Democrats eventually stopped assailing the NFL even though they remain
unsatisfied with NFL policies.

“My sense now is that people have felt that the efforts we have made are
significant and real,” said Hogan, who will be among those in attendance in
Phoenix, Arizona.

Hogan’s credentials were tailor-made for the NFL job. She helped write the
landmark Violence Against Women Act in 1994 while working for Biden’s
Senate Judiciary Committee.

A graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, Hogan had left
Biden’s staff in 2013 after working for him since he became vice president.
Senate Days

Ties between the two went back to Biden’s senate days, when he hired her
for his Judiciary Committee staff in 1991. She stayed with Biden for six
years before taking a 12-year break to raise a son and a daughter, now 15
and 18 respectively.

Hogan said she had been talking to the NFL about the lobbyist job months
before the Rice video became public in September. When that happened,
prompting calls for Goodell’s resignation, NFL officials assumed that she
would turn the position down, according to Kim Gandy, president of the
National Network to End Domestic Violence, who knew Hogan from her work on
the issue in the 1990s.

“They thought, ‘Oh my god, we’ve blown it with this woman,’” Gandy said
Hogan told her.

Hogan declined to comment on that exchange, though she said the controversy
made the position more interesting.

Even so, Hogan said holding the job sometimes surprises even herself, given
that she’s a woman and that the league has grappled with domestic violence,
her hallmark issue.
’Human Issues’

Why, then, did she take the job? “I realized what a big platform the league
has to affect society’s understanding of complicated and difficult human
issues,” she said.

To her great surprise, she said, she now finds that the NFL carries more
cachet than the White House for friends and family, who are captivated by
her work and quicker to return phone calls.

“I joke about the fact that when I said I was joining the NFL, you wouldn’t
have thought I had a great job before or a career,” she said.

The atmosphere for the NFL was far from humorous on Sept. 8, when the
website TMZ released the tape showing Rice knocking out Janay Palmer, now
his wife. Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee wanted to
know if anyone in the league had seen the tape earlier. Boxer sent a
letter, signed by 16 of the 17 female senators, demanding that Goodell
adopt a zero tolerance policy.
Antitrust Exemption

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey introduced legislation attacking the
NFL’s tax-exempt status and using any tax savings to fund anti-domestic
violence groups.

UltraViolet, a women’s advocacy organization, paid for airplanes to fly
over stadiums with “#GoodellMustGo” banners. He was castigated for
suspending Rice for only two games when the beating surfaced seven months
earlier with the player’s arrest.

One of Hogan’s goals was to beat back demands that the NFL adopt a zero
tolerance policy. At the meeting with Boxer’s and Feinstein’s staff, she
explained the league’s reasons for resisting the policy: Victims would be
even more reluctant to come forward knowing the accusations would end their
husband’s career.

“We were batting around ideas,” said Hogan. “It was incredibly productive.”

Boxer was already a fan of Hogan’s.

“I well remember the days when we worked together on the Violence Against
Women Act,” Boxer wrote the NFL, addressing the letter to Hogan. “I was
heartened to hear that you will be starting your job at the National
Football League.”
The Hotline

Hogan focused mostly on calming congressional concerns. She also talked to
heads of domestic violence groups several times including Gandy. Hogan had
a history with one such group, the National Domestic Violence Hotline. That
organization, which became among the most visibly associated with the NFL’s
rehabilitation effort, was created by the Violence Against Women Act, the
law she helped write.

The Hotline was struggling to handle the spike in calls from victims of
abuse that followed the Rice video. The NFL offered a $5 million annual
contribution for the next five years. It would almost double the
organization’s $7 million budget.

Hotline executives paused before taking the money.

“We were worried people would say the NFL was buying us off,” said Katie
Ray-Jones, the group’s president. The group decided to accept the money
after an emergency board meeting on Sept. 18.
Build Goodwill

Hogan also played a role in tempering the tone of the one congressional
hearing that was held. Hogan answered staff questions ahead of the Dec. 2
hearing by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation,
checking facts and confirming details. The cooperation from the NFL helped
build goodwill by the time the hearing occurred, said a Senate committee
staff member familiar with the hearing who asked for anonymity to discuss
the matter.

While senators criticized the NFL, most media attention was focused on Troy
Vincent. The league’s vice president of football operations and former
defensive back, Vincent choked up as he described watching his mother being
beaten in their home.

Eight days after the congressional hearing, NFL owners adopted a new
personal conduct policy that calls for a six-game suspension without pay
for a first-time domestic violence violation, and banishment from the game
for a second offense.

No further congressional hearings are planned, according to staff at the
House and Senate committees that oversee sports. Measures to revoke the
league’s lucrative antitrust exemption have also failed to gain traction.
’Throwing Money’

Connecticut Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal said he still plans to
reintroduce a bill to put the exemption up for review.

“This issue is far from over,” Blumenthal said. “They can’t solve this
problem by just throwing money at it or by public relations.”

Representative Jackie Speier of California is also unswayed.

“It is not lost on me that the lobbyist that the NFL hired used to be Joe
Biden’s staffer and worked on VAWA,” Speier, a Democrat, said in an
interview. “It feels to me like the mother who founded Mother’s Against
Drunk Driving going to work for the spirits industry.”

Though some advocacy groups remain upset, including the National
Organization for Women, others have gone from anger to a wait-and-see
posture.

Hogan understands this sentiment.

“The work we’re doing is an ongoing commitment,” she said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Annie Linskey in Washington at
alinskey@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Winnie O’Kelley at
wokelley@bloomberg.net Larry Reibstein, Justin Blum


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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