Minnesota Vikings Hire Lawyers For Potential Legal Action

In preparation for any potential legal action from former punter Chris Kluwe, the Minnesota Vikings have brought in a couple of high-powered lawyers, one of whom has a significant amount of experience in dealing with the National Football League.

The team has retained Roberta Kaplan and Ted Wells in preparation for a potential lawsuit. Wells' name may sound familiar to you. . .he was the man that conducted the investigation into the Miami Dolphins' bullying scandal (the blow-up involving offensive linemen Jonathan Martin and Richie Incognito), and wrote the final opinion on it.

Kaplan released the following statement:

Ted Wells and I have reviewed the investigative findings and firmly believe that the Vikings have worked incredibly hard to achieve an environment of tolerance within the team and organization. While there can be no question that Ted and I are sensitive to issues of diversity and inclusion, here, there is no evidence to suggest that Mr. Kluwe was released from the Vikings for any reason other than his skills as a punter. There also was no effort to unfairly discourage his activism while he was a member of the Vikings; to the contrary, it was encouraged by the owners of the Vikings. While our hope is to take a fresh look and assist the Vikings in reaching a resolution with Mr. Kluwe short of litigation, if that is not possible, we will fully defend the Vikings in court.

Now, as there isn't a whole lot more to this story, I want to take a moment to reinforce our position on stories about this situation, specifically why comments aren't allowed on this or any other story regarding it.

The stories about the whole situation with Chris Kluwe, Mike Priefer, and the Minnesota Vikings is germane to the team, obviously. Therefore, we will continue to do posts on it. And if the comments on those stories would remain confined to the situation itself and how it affects the team, then we could probably go ahead and open up the comments sections on these stories.

However, as we've seen time and time again, the discussion does not remain focused on how it affects the team, and invariably breaks down into a gigantic moral, ethical, and intellectual junk-waving contest, complete with name-calling and other such nastiness. And I think I speak for every member of the DN staff when I say that we have neither the time nor the inclination to police that sort of thing, particularly when it will persist regardless of warnings or anything along those lines from us.

So there you go. We're going to continue to do the occasional story on the Kluwe/Priefer situation, and we're still not opening up the comments on them. We don't see that changing in the near future, either.