The National Football League:
It’s the most popular sports league in the U.S.,
and brings people together over food, family, fun,
love of country and, uhh ...
Now we're gonna go to a troubling new study about
the risk of brain injury and football
Ezekiel Elliott
suspended without pay over allegations of domestic violence.
Colin Kaepernick is taking his collusion case
against the NFL to trial.
And one of the many NFL issues that doesn't get as
much coverage is the sexual harassment and overall
exploitation of the games cheerleaders.
Washington Redskins cheerleaders on this
2013 trip tell NBC News they felt
sexually exploited.
Hey guys, it’s Omar,
and this Sunday we’re talking about how the NFL’s
been mistreating its cheerleaders for decades,
and how some cheerleaders are starting to fight back.
But before we get into it, if you like topics like this
hit that subscribe button.
Well, dance and cheerleading are not only a sport, it's an art.
And I think that's why I fell in love with it.
It's expressing yourself through movement and it's
performing and making other people happy.
And that's why I love it so much.
That’s Bailey Davis, former cheerleader
with the New Orleans Saints.
After three years of being on the team she was fired
by the Saints for posting a photo of
herself in a one-piece outfit
on her Instagram page.
The team said that her post violated their rules
that cheerleaders not appear nude, semi-nude or in lingerie.
It just didn't make sense to me that
they could promote me however they wanted to.
But when I did it, it was seen as inappropriate
and made me a bad representation of the team.
I didn't really understand that they could post
pictures of me in my uniform, which is a
two-piece and low-cut, but the bodysuit was inappropriate.
They also allege without proof that Davis attended a
party where a player from the organization was present
– something that would also violate team rules.
They told me that if a cheerleader's name even came
out of the football player's mouth, she would be fired.
And that's when I realized, wow, the players
don't have this rule at all.
Davis and her lawyer have since filed a federal complaint
against the NFL and the Saints
on the basis of gender discrimination, arguing that the
no-contact rule between cheerleaders and players
should go both ways if the rule were to remain.
The first thing to do, that is absolutely free of the NFL,
is to change the rules, have them equal.
Have us not feel like we're the ones having to
protect ourselves from the football players.
Don't put it completely on us,
and our job shouldn't ride on whether a
football player is trying to contact us or not.
But even though this might seem
like an open-and-shut case, it's not.
The NFL’s been able to argue on numerous occasions – which we’ll get to –
that cheerleaders are not its direct employees,
and that gender discrimination rules only apply to "NFL personnel,"
a title that Davis and her lawyer argue also applies to her.
OK, before I continue telling you about Davis,
let's contextualize cheerleading a bit and
figure out how we got to this point.
Organized cheerleading as a profession goes back to the 1890s
and was a male-dominated activity.
And female cheerleaders don't arrive on the scene
until the 1940s as men were being
drafted and sent off to serve in World War II.
Oh, and some famous male cheerleaders of the past?
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mitt Romney, George W. bush...
… Dubya did a whole lot of cheering for war, didn’t he?
Checks out.
The NFL introduced professional cheerleading in the 1950s
for the then Baltimore Colts,
and the cheerleaders wore noticeably more modest uniforms.
It wasn't until the 1970s that NFL
cheerleader uniforms changed to what we know today.
The Dallas Cowboys introduced new uniforms
that caught America's attention, especially after
the 1972 Super Bowl, where the cheer squad
performed dance routines as opposed to their usual acrobatics.
But since then, criticism that NFL cheerleaders are used
as props for ogling has been a
consistent grievance leveled against the league.
Nancy Armour is a sports columnist for USA Today
and has reported on this ongoing story.
I think the problem with professional cheerleading
is in a lot of ways it's not cheerleading.
It's basically treating women as objects.
If you look at cheerleading in college it's much more
of an athletic endeavor, a sport.
It's open to men and women and that's not the
case with professional cheerleaders and
unfortunately that leads to abuses of
the women by the people who are employing them.
Not only do they have to deal with fans
ogling them and scrutinizing their appearance,
they had to deal with
scrutiny from NFL teams themselves.
The majority of NFL teams have weight
restrictions for their cheerleaders,
where they have to stay within a certain
weight level and are forbidden from
gaining even a few pounds.
Of course, this not only has to do
with their appearance on the field, but also on the wildly
popular cheerleader calendars.
One example of this is the terribly-named
Washington Redskins who flew their
cheerleaders to Costa Rica for a
calendar shoot in 2013.
During the shoot, some cheerleaders reported
they were acquired to stand around topless, even
though there wouldn't be any nudity in the calendar,
while others stood around with only body paint to cover them.
But it gets even worse.
The cheerleaders had to deal with
spectators from the Redskins fan base
who had been invited to attend the photo shoot.
By having cheerleaders in their current form,
in these sexed-up objects on the sidelines,
that have really no other role
or no other purpose than to be ogled
by fans, the NFL is telling women,
"We really don't care about you.
We want your money,
but you as people, you as employees,
we don't really care about you."
Davis also experienced a lot of rules
and restrictions around her appearance
at the games and even at practice.
Our contract was very strict as far as
appearance goes we always had to have
our nails manicured and done either
nude or French tip. We always had to have full
face gameday makeup that was for appearances.
Obviously game day and practice,
we always had to have her hair done,
we always had to have a spray tan,
and all that we had to pay for ourselves.
But Davis also experienced numerous episodes
of full-on sexual harassment while
trying to sell cheerleader calendars to
fans at the game.
And in order for Bailey to cheer
on the field, she had to sell a minimum
number of these calendars in
massive crowds that often led to uncomfortable situations.
They would say rude sexual comments.
I've had my butt grabbed before and it is a very shameful
feeling and you feel like it's your fault.
And there was one instance where a fan
pulled a calendar out of my hand
and he immediately flipped to my month in the
swimsuit calendar and he made just a
simple sexual comment about my body and
that was kind of my breaking point.
Davis believes that to prevent sexual harassment,
cheerleaders need protection in these situations,
just as the players receive protection when they're in public.
Don't have us up on a pedestal as
celebrities and in these beautiful
uniforms and then throw us out into the
crowd with no protection, having fans be
able to speak to us however they want
and touch us if they want.
That's just completely ridiculous
And then there's wages.
While some players are making millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars,
cheerleaders aren't even making minimum wage.
In 2014, the now Las Vegas bound Oakland Raiders
settled a lawsuit where they were accused of only paying
their cheerleaders 5 dollars an hour -
when minimum wage in California at the time
was $8 an hour.
And that same year, the
Buffalo Bills disbanded their
cheerleading squad after five former members filed a
lawsuit alleging they had gone unpaid for hours they
had worked.
And Nancy Armour believes this is
further evidence that the
multibillion-dollar NFL doesn't value these women.
If you are contending that these women
are valued employees, that they're an
important part of the message that you send,
they're an important part of your
team's community, then their pay should
reflect that. It should be more than, you
know, minimum wage or whatever it is that they get.
Compensate them fairly.
So, in the wake of the #MeToo movement with open
conversations about sexual misconduct
and creating safer environments for
women, why have the NFL and its clubs
been so slow to enact better pay and
create a safer environment for the cheerleaders?
The questions about cheerleaders and kind of the grousing
about them has been going on for years.
But I think women are finally saying, "No.
You know what? This is not
fair, this is not acceptable, and I'm not
going to take it anymore."
Despite the slow response the NFL has
agreed to hold meetings with Davis and
her lawyer to address unfair pay and
discuss creating safer environments for cheerleaders.
But many remain skeptical about how far the league is willing to
go to bring that change, especially when
they're so hesitant about making change in general.
Cheerleader rules are set by each team.
So, the league can only do so much.
But the league can send a very important message that this is appropriate,
this is not, and we really
think that you should conform to the more appropriate set of rules.
So, what can change?
Well, some think the reintroduction of men into NFL cheerleading squads
could change the pervasive climate of sexual harassment.
Both the Los Angeles Rams
and New Orleans Saints - Davis's former
team - have introduced men as part of
their upcoming cheerleading squads.
Nancy Armour thinks it's not necessarily a
matter of including men on cheerleading
squads and more about NFL ownership.
I'm not sure if the NFL will ever get rid of
cheerleading altogether. I think it's
engrained in the sport and I think there
are unfortunately too many people who
think that it's necessary to objectify
women as part of the entertainment.
I think within the next hopefully five
years cheerleaders will look different,
they will be treated differently,
and there will be a different attitude about what they do.