Jonathan Martin, Richie Incognito scandal returns to the front burner, years later

It started with a Wednesday #longread from ESPN.com that focused on the current whereabouts of former NFL tackle Jonathan Martin. Landing three days after the Super Bowl and more than a dozen years after long-forgotten events that once took the league by storm, it barely made a blip.

On the first Sunday since the conclusion of the 2024 season, it finally registered.

It's not clear how it happened. The teammate at the center of the story — Richie Incognito — sent a direct message to the PFT Twitter account at 2:45 p.m. ET. on Sunday afternoon with a link to a column from Omar Kelly of the Miami Herald with this title: "Jonathan Martin admitted he lied about being bullied."

Then, at 10:17 p.m. ET on Sunday night, Incognito sent a second direct message to the DM: "Care to comment? "

It's unclear what else happened on Sunday to bring the ESPN.com story to the surface. At 4:09 p.m. ET, Adam Schefter of ESPN posted out of the blue a screen shot of a portion of the ESPN.com article in which Martin is quoted as saying this: "I never believed for a second I was being bullied. . . . It's a story that I've been trying to fix for 10 years."

Schefter called it a "notable excerpt." Incognito, not recognizing that Schefter's tweet actually did him a favor, replied with this: "Notable excerpt?! You tried to ruin my life over this bullshit."

Tweeted Incognito at 5:18 p.m. ET regarding Martin: "He couldn’t cut it in the NFL so he quit and his mom blamed me. Legacy media pushed this narrative long and far. Too bad it was all a lie! They lied to protect his money. He quit… the team had every right to claw back that money. His mom started the bullying narrative with [ESPN]."

In fairness to Incognito, Martin's recent comments support that conclusion.

"I had a situation with my teammates that I wasn't super happy about," Martin told Anthony Olvieri of ESPN.com in the lengthy article that went mostly unnoticed for days. "But my mother had her own read on the situation."

"I didn't believe any of the stances I was taking, right, where I'm this victim," Martin added. "I wasn't a victim, right? And, again, it's been a point of consternation."

Martin's father, Gus, acknowledged to Olvieri that he and Martin's mother "did strongly intervene" in order to "make sure he was protected."

"My mother maybe in her mind -- I can't read her mind -- she thought she was doing the right thing," Jonathan Martin told Olvieri.

The article includes the text of a voice message that Incognito left to Jonathan Martin on April 6, 2013, less than a year after the Dolphins selected him in the second round of the draft: "Hey, wassup, you half-n----- piece of s---. I saw you on Twitter, you been training 10 weeks. I'll s--- in your f---ing mouth. I'm going to slap your f---ing mouth, I'm going to slap your real mother across the face. F--- you, you're still a rookie. I'll kill you."

That said, there's a nuance to this that seems to be lost on many. It's one thing for Jonathan Martin to say he never believed he was being bullied. It's another thing to ignore the various findings from the extensive investigation that occurred at the time. (Here’s the summary of the report from Ted Wells, as posted by NFL.com at the time.)

Wells found that Incognito and others repeatedly harassed Martin. That the harassment contributed to Jonathan Martin's pre-existing mental-health issues. That the harassment was consistent with workplace bullying. That, to the extent the conduct was a reflection of the prevailing culture among the Dolphins' offensive linemen (and potentially if not likely in other NFL locker rooms), it does not excuse the behavior.

And the behavior went beyond Jonathan Martin. From the summary: "We found that the [Dolphins'] Assistant Trainer, who was born in Japan, was the target of frequent and persistent harassment, including insults relating to his race and national origin."

To the extent that Incognito is now taking a victory lap, let's remember that it's not the only time his behavior got him in trouble.

So, yes, it's far more complicated than an isolated comment from a man who is trying to put the incident in his past. In many respects, a locker room remains the last bastion of rough talk, whether it's a billionaire-turned-politician explaining away a certain remark about grabbing women in a certain place or whether it's athletes saying things to each other that they'd never knowingly say into a hot mic.

And there's reason to think Jonathan Martin still has hard feelings about what happened, regardless of whether he's willing to admit that a six-foot, five-inch, 315-pound football player tolerated harassment in silence, in lieu of cracking a few skulls. Asked by Olvieri whether he'd consider speaking with Incognito and other teammates who were found to have behaved improperly, Jonathan Martin provided a one-word answer: "No."

If everything was fine, there's no reason to not speak to them. Unless, of course, one or more of them continues to insist, well over a decade later, that the many things said and done were fine and dandy.

Ultimately, Incognito and others who were publicly chastised by the Wells report fell victim to the same mindset that fueled the punishments meted out a year earlier, in the Saints bullying scandal. Rather than admit that a significant cultural problem within the locker room at large needs to be addressed, the NFL grabbed a piece of low-hanging fruit, squished it, and hoped that the outcome would scare everyone else straight.

And let's not forget the very real possibility that the Wells report on the bullying scandal had a preordained conclusion. The Wells's report on the #Deflategate scandal little more than a year later supports a reasonable conclusion that the investigation started with the league's preferred outcome and worked backward.

So, basically, the Incognito-Martin case alerted the NFL to a problem that had been festering under its nose for years if not decades, with the Dolphins and potentially if not likely elsewhere. Instead of acknowledging that fact (if it is factual) and embarking on the more difficult and delicate effort to change the league's culture on a league-wide basis, Wells provided the NFL with the hammer necessary to create the impression that it was an aberration.

Even if it was anything but. Incognito's point is that this is how things worked in locker rooms. It's how players communicated with each other. In isolation, it looks and sounds bad.

Bad enough to get the league to circle the wagons and clutch its pearls, rather than acknowledging that this is how things worked, and that the league allowed it to happen until the shit hit the fan in Miami.