Jeremy Roenick accuses NBC of discrimination in potentially damaging lawsuit.

One of the National Hockey League's most controversial stars once again finds himself at the center of controversy, although this time it is in an arena that he is considerably less familiar with. According to a recent report from Variety's Gene Maddus, Roenick has filed a lawsuit against his former employer in NBC Sports alleging that the company discriminated against him when they fired him.

For those of you who have not followed this story, Roenick was suspended and eventually fired after he made some rather graphic comments about his wife and her friend, Kathryn Tappen, while he was featured on Barstool Sports' Spittin Chiclets podcast. I won't repeat the comments here but Roenick spoke about parts of her body and described fantasizing about the possibility of bringing Tappen into he and his wife's bedroom.  Tappen, although clearly a friend of the family, is Roenick's colleague at NBC Sports and was understandably uncomfortable with the rather sexual comments made by one of her colleagues. NBC made the decision to suspend Roenick from their broadcast at the time of the incident and has since fired him, leading to this current lawsuit. 

According to Roenick however the company discriminated against him by allowing other employees to make similar comments directly on an NBC broadcast while firing him for his comments that were admittedly on a different platform entirely. Roenick specifically cites incidents involving NBC commentators Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir in which they make comments describing body parts in a similar fashion and even make an insinuation of an affair involving one of the competitors they were commenting on at the time. That in and of itself seems like a pretty weak argument but Roenick claims to have discussed this privately at NBC with his supervisor Sam Flood, and this is where things get disturbing. 

Roenick claims he pointed out the hypocrisy to Flood only to have Flood then claim that Weir “is gay and can say whatever.” Now I must stress that this is Jeremy Roenick's version of events and has not been proven to be true but if Roenick is indeed telling the truth this would clearly be discrimination based on his sexual preference, something that is obviously frowned upon. Roenick also claims that his support for President Donald Trump may have played a factor with Flood repeatedly rebuking him on this matter. Roenick says that he was told the following when asking for permission to speak at the 2016 Republican National Convention:

“I’m not saying what you can do. You know who you work for. You work for NBC. That would not look good on your NBC record.” 

Roenick also claims that Flood would continue to make derogatory remarks regarding his political beliefs following that incident, remarks like “your boy is messing up this country.” Again I must stress that these are merely claims that have been filled by Jeremy Roenick and have yet to be proven true in a court of law, however if Roenick does indeed have evidence of these claims it could mean a big time lawsuit for NBC and NBC Sports.