Last week, the Portland Trail Blazers fired announcer Braiden Bell over some untoward Tweets he made as a teenager. Now Bell’s lawyer is pressing the team to explain their legal reasoning for the firing and is asking to reinstate his client to the position.
Early this month, the team hired Bell, 29, as their new play-by-play man, but as soon as the announcement went out to the press, Internet sleuths dug up some unfortunate social media posts Bell made when he was 15. Only hours after hiring him, the Trail Blazers abruptly announced they had pulled his invitation to join the broadcast booth, and he no longer had a job in Portland.
Now the broadcaster’s attorney, Arnie Herz, is demanding that the team explain itself and wants Bell to be reinstated to his job.
Noting that Bell has apologized for the posts he made as a kid, attorney Herz says that the team should not hold 14-year-old tweets against his client.
“Braiden is not asking anyone to excuse what he wrote,” Herz wrote in a press release, according to Sport & State. “He has owned it, without excuses. What he is asking is whether a boy’s words from fourteen years ago should outweigh everything the man has done since. If that is the standard, there is hardly a person in any organization in America who could meet it. Accountability means owning what you did and showing who you have become. Braiden has done both.”
Herz has reportedly sent a letter to the Trail Blazers demanding they prove they had a legal basis to rescind the job offer and explain why they believe they have the legal right to fire him. Herz also warned that he would go public unless the team responded in 24 hours.
When the firing was announced, the team said in a statement that, “The Portland Trail Blazers have zero tolerance for racist, sexist, or harmful comments. Social media posts made by our recently announced play-by-play broadcaster are in clear violation of team and league policies, as well as our values and expectations. Therefore, we will not be moving forward with this broadcaster.”
Herz added that he was told the team would not respond within the 24-hour window and that there would be no stepping back from the firing. Still, Herz insisted that he is “very confident in our legal position regardless of what they throw at us.”
“We’re not going away. This is not going away. It’s going to stay in the news cycle,” Herz said, noting that he and Bell will be going on several sports interview shows in the coming days.
Herz also had a message for NBA commissioner Adam Silver.
“I would ask Adam Silver to make a few phone calls here, and say, ‘This is not who we are as a league. This is not who we are in this country right now. There’s enough divisiveness that we’re not going to start holding 15-year-old boys responsible for what they said for the rest of their life,’” he told Sport & State.
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