NFLPA files suit, angered by way NFL portrayed destruction of Tom Brady's phone

Attorney Jeffrey Kessler has battled the NFL and its owners for years in court on behalf of the league's players. So it was unusual he found himself agreeing Wednesday morning with a regular adversary: New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.

Hours after Kraft ripped the NFL in the wake of Commissioner Roger Goodell's decision to uphold quarterback Tom Brady’s four-game suspension, Kessler — retained by the NFL Players Associationto represent Brady at his appeal hearing last month — also derided the decision, and in particular the gravity Goodell gave to the destruction of Brady’s old cellphone.

“It’s just grasping at straws to try to divert attention from their complete lack of evidence or legal process to justify what’s happened here,” Kessler told USA TODAY Sports by phone. “You heard the outrage today from Mr. Kraft. That was completely justified. I’ve never more agreed with Robert Kraft in my life, about anything.”

The NFLPA filed a lawsuit late Wednesday afternoon in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis. It asks the court to vacate Goodell’s decision on four major grounds, including Goodell’s partiality, and either rule by Sept. 4 — six days before the Patriots’ regular-season opener against the Pittsburgh Steelers — or issue an injunction that allows Brady to play.

The union’s suit comes one day after the NFL Management Council filed its own lawsuit in Manhattan and asked that court to confirm Goodell’s decision — a move Kessler called “very, very peculiar” and an obvious ploy to secure a more favorable venue.

The NFLPA can’t reargue the facts of the case in court. It must target the process through which the discipline was issued and confirmed. But Kessler made clear he wasn’t pleased about the way Goodell’s decision presented the destruction of the phone, which Brady says he does regularly when he gets a new one, before an interview with investigators as evidence of a cover-up.

Kessler said every text in the league-commissioned Wells Report appeared in Brady’s phone logs, which were turned over. In a footnote, Goodell wrote the records should’ve been turned over sooner, and a suggestion by Brady’s agents that the NFL could track down the people Brady texted and ask them to provide the records was “simply not practical.”

“The NFL has made no claim that somehow they’re missing something,” Kessler said. “They made this argument, ‘Well, maybe if they looked at his phone, they’d find some incriminating e-mail like from Tom to his father.’ Really? That’s what they’re arguing about?”

The NFL did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the union’s lawsuit, which Kessler said would be designated as a related case to that of Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson.

The hope is it lands before U.S. District Judge David S. Doty, who in February vacated the arbitration award issued by the appeals officer Goodell designated, Harold Henderson, and thus is “in the best position to determine to what degree his decision in Peterson already requires this discipline be thrown out for lack of notice,” Kessler said.