More details on Watson's almost trade

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https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiENwzIL7xXFC0WSVzUH1wFuAqGQgEKhAIACoHCAowz939CjDL4fUCMLq51wU?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

 

As the Texans tried to deal Deshaun Watson ahead of Tuesday's trade deadline, the biggest problem was getting teams to pay what the Texans deemed as full price for a quarterback who has 22 civil lawsuits filed against him accusing him of sexual assault during massage sessions in 2020 and 2021. Rusty Hardin, Watson's attorney, says any sexual encounters during the sessions were consensual. 

According to Tony Buzbee, the attorney representing the 22 women who filed the lawsuits, Watson's team tried to settle those cases before the deadline to help facilitate a trade.

None of the cases ended up getting settled and the Texans didn't find a team that was willing to meet their trade demands, which reportedly include three first-round picks and a combination of three second-round picks or young players who could contribute for years to come. The Texans will try again to trade Watson in the offseason head of April's NFL Draft.

"Let's be clear, whether he's traded or not really has nothing to do with me or the plaintiffs that I represent," Buzbee told Fox 26's Mark Berman on Tuesday. "I guess now that the heat is off I probably won't be getting calls from the other side wanting to settle the case. Obviously, there was some effort - a pretty tough effort - to try to settle the case and it didn't happen."

Buzbee told Berman that at first, Watson's side wanted to try to settle all the cases, but then were willing to just settle as many as they could ahead of the trade deadline to try to make the Dolphins feel better about acquiring the quarterback.

"At first, it was 'We need to get 22 cases settled,' then it was 'Well, maybe we could do it with 20 cases settled,' and finally I think there was some discussion about maybe even less than that, but the bottom line was that based on the terms that were submitted to us, we weren't going to get 22 settlements, period," Buzbee said. 

 

The sticking spot on any settlement talk was a non-disclosure agreement that some of the women didn't want to sign, according to Buzbee.

 

"There were non-disclosure agreements and many of the women pushed back on those," Buzbee said. "We modified those substantially and then there were still some women who said, 'I'm never going to sign this.' So that was a deal-breaker."