Just days after Fox Sports NFL analyst Mark Sanchez was arrested for allegedly attacking a 69-year-old grease truck driver, an incident for which he now faces multiple criminal charges, the victim filed a civil lawsuit against both Sanchez and his employer, Fox Corporation.
Sanchez was in Indianapolis, where the incident took place, on business for Fox. He was scheduled to call the Raiders-Colts game the following day.
However, few would argue that Sanchez was acting in his official capacity as a Fox employee during the incident. So, why then would the victim include Fox in the lawsuit? Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio explained the rationale on a recent episode of Pro Football Talk Live:
“Companies typically aren’t responsible for the criminal misconduct of their employees when it occurs beyond the scope of the employment,” Florio, a former attorney, explained. “And no one’s ever going to argue that Mark Sanchez did this while actually on the clock for Fox. He was in town on Fox business. And it’s entirely possible that before the incident, Sanchez, who was allegedly intoxicated to a significant degree, it’s possible he was at some event with his Fox colleagues. A little team-building, little bonding, little dinner, little alcohol, or a lot as the case may be.
“And you know, you got to think about it in very pragmatic terms. Fox takes employees into communities throughout the country. And there’s a basic duty of care that you are bringing individuals into these communities who are not going to wreak havoc when they get there. So the question becomes, I think … what it would take to make an employer responsible for the off duty misconduct of an employee who’s traveling on business and maybe was just coming from a business-related event where he was over-served and it wasn’t noticed and the person wasn’t properly delivered back to wherever he was staying.
“In this case, the argument is Fox knew, or the argument will be Fox knew or should have known that Mark Sanchez, number one, has the propensity … to get drunk to the point where he would create issues with others and he’s done it before. That would be what you try to explore in the discovery process. And the more specific argument would be he was drunk that night and none of his Fox colleagues did anything to keep him from being set loose on the streets of Indianapolis.”
Now, it’s important to note this is all purely hypothetical. We don’t know whether Sanchez was out with his Fox colleagues the night of the incident. We don’t know whether Sanchez has a propensity to drink alcohol to excess. We don’t know if he has a history of aggressive behavior in these circumstances.
There’s a lot that an investigation still has to lay bare. But Florio makes a compelling argument for why Fox should be included in the victim’s initial lawsuit. If some of the details of the case unfold in the way Florio described, the company could very well be liable to some degree.
That creates an interesting dynamic when it comes to Sanchez’s future employment status with Fox, Florio later suggests.
“This is one of the problems that you face when you’ve been sued for something an employee did. Do you cut him loose or do you keep him close? Because you need him now. You need him to support the party line. You need him to not be giving evidence along the lines of, ‘Yeah, you know, I do this all the time. Yeah, we go out and I have too much to drink and I tell them, you know, I really don’t want to do this, but you know, and no, they don’t help me back to my hotel.’
“If he’s no longer employed by Fox, he’s got a different incentive than if he is. The plaintiff may have done Mark Sanchez a favor from an employment standpoint by keeping him employed by Fox because [if] you sue him, Fox is going to be more inclined to keep him close, at least until this case is over,” Florio concludes.
Sanchez’s future at Fox is simply another fascinating angle in this disturbing story, one that will likely play out as details continue to emerge and the legal process runs its course.
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