The Carolina Panthers announced on Friday that the team is investigating team owner and founder Jerry Richardson for workplace misconduct.
The Carolina Panthers announced on Friday that the team is investigating team owner and founder Jerry Richardson for workplace misconduct.
Richardson, who has owned the team since it began play as an NFL expansion franchise in the 1995 season and led the ownership group that brought professional football to the Carolinas, is 81.
The investigation will be conducted by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart and Sullivan, LLP, an international law firm. It will also be overseen by Erskine Bowles, a limited owner with the team and a former White House Chief of Staff.
“The Carolina Panthers and Mr. Richardson take these allegations very seriously and are fully committed to a full investigation and taking appropriate steps to address and remediate any misconduct,” team spokesman Steven Drummond said in the statement. “The entire organization is fully committed to ensuring a safe, comfortable and diverse work environment where all individuals, regardless of sex, race, color, religion, gender, or sexual identity or orientation, are treated fairly and equally. We have work to do to achieve this goal, but we are going to meet it.”
The statement said the Panthers cannot comment publicly on the specifics of the allegations.
“Erskine Bowles is a trusted leader of unquestioned integrity,” Drummond said. “We look forward to this report, which we know will be honest and thorough.”
A native Carolinian who is the only current owner to have also played in the NFL, Richardson began the process of trying to obtain an NFL team for Charlotte in 1987 and was awarded the franchise on Oct. 26,1993. Richardson is a former wide receiver at Wofford and with the Baltimore Colts who made his money mostly in the restaurant business. He has been the Panthers’ majority owner since the day it began play in 1995.
Richardson has rarely appeared in public settings in recent years, although he has continued to attend Panthers games. He made headlines in 2009 when his sons, Mark and Jon, both suddenly resigned their team presidencies.
The very public family split meant that the family business was no longer much of a family business. Richardson said in 2009 he and his family owned 48 percent of the team, with the other 52 percent being owned by a group of about a dozen minority partners. There have been numerous reports that the plan is for the Panthers to be sold within two years of Richardson’s death.
Richardson has survived a series of serious health-related issues in the past 15 years. He overcame prostate cancer and also underwent quadruple bypass surgery in 2002.
Richardson had a pacemaker/defibrillator inserted in his heart in 2008, and doctors told him then he would eventually need a heart transplant.
Two months after going on the donor waiting list, Richardson, then 72, received his heart transplant in 2009 during a five-hour procedure at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte. The donor has never been identified.
In 2016, in honor of Richardson’s 80th birthday, his business partners with the Panthers unveiled a nearly 13-foot statue of Richardson. The sculpture stands in front of the north gate of Bank of America Stadium. It shows Richardson in a business suit, holding a football and flanked by two menacing black panthers.
The Panthers have made a couple of unusual front-office moves in 2017 that Richardson has never answered questions about. Team president Danny Morrison, a popular figure who worked on the business side of the operations, resigned unexpectedly in February after eight years on the job.
And on the eve of training camp in July, Richardson unexpectedly fired general manager Dave Gettleman. In four years as the Panthers GM, Gettleman’s Carolina teams had made the playoffs three times and the Super Bowl once. Richardson then hired former GM Marty Hurney – who Richardson had previously fired in 2012 – to serve as the interim general manager.
