Deshaun Watson returns to the NFL this week, after serving an 11-game suspension and showing no contrition. Twenty-nine women have publicly shared accounts of sexual assault or harassment by Watson. The NFL responded by handing him a suspension, and the Browns responded by handing him their team. Cleveland traded three first-round picks for Watson. They signed him to a fully guaranteed $230 million contract. They have invested in him and defended him to a degree that is disturbing and gross, and it raises the question: What should Browns fans with a conscience do now?
It’s one thing to love the sinner. It’s quite another to wear his name on your back and scream joyfully when he does his job well.
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There are longtime Browns fans who have sworn off their team forever, a choice they are obviously entitled to make. But there are surely exponentially more who will keep cheering for the team they have loved their whole lives (even, for many, during that late-’90s interlude when the team did not even technically exist).
We are all making a terrible mistake if we frame this as a binary choice: You either support survivors or you cheer for the Browns. There are Cleveland fans all over Northeast Ohio—there always will be. Pitting them against survivors of sexual violence is an awful idea. There has to be a better approach.
Ask Donisha Greene. She is the director of community engagement at the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center, showing survivors that there are people who believe and love them. She is also the wife and mother of two Clevelanders who love their football team.
When the Browns acquired Watson, Donisha watched her 16-year-old son, Masir, celebrate: Finally, his perennially failing team had its franchise quarterback. “Like, We’re going to the Super Bowl, Mom!” she remembers. But Donisha also saw calls to the crisis center hotline more than double. These weren’t season-ticket holders calling the team to complain or sports-radio listeners calling in to vent. They were survivors reliving their trauma.
“When they hear a story like Deshaun Watson’s, where he still gets to move about freely, it may trigger their own stories where the perpetrator is not held accountable to the degree they should have been held accountable,” Greene says. “It can be hurtful. It’s reliving the story on a grander scale.”
If we reduce Deshaun Watson to an argument, it’s easy to pick a side: Don’t cheer for him or his team. But a survivors’ advocate must have empathy above all else, and empathy is limited only by how much you can muster. Greene has enough of it for Browns fans who feel conflicted—and she knows that many of them feel conflicted.
She says that in the first few weeks after the Browns traded for Watson, the crisis center added about 2,000 new donors. Some donated the cost of a Browns ticket. Others specified that they were donating in honor of the women who shared their stories about Watson. Since then, some have donated for Browns touchdowns. Many have donated in the name of the Browns’ last quarterback—“so many Baker Mayfields,” Greene says with a laugh. In terms of talent on the field, Watson is a clear upgrade over Mayfield. But rooting for him is still harder.
“I think what I’ve heard from Browns fans is that they struggle,” Greene says. “It’s such a strong, vibrant sports town. You’re talking about lifelong fandom. Then you’re met with … one person that’s supposed to represent a whole team. It’s a glaring dissonance that you’re dealing with. For me, in the work that I do, being part of CRCC, our stance is we believe survivors. That is more important than anything else, for sure.”
Masir went to a preseason game and saw the worst of Browns fans: people making vulgar comments about the women, mocking the massage therapists who described Watson’s assaults of them. He was properly appalled. But he still joined them in the stands.
“My son, more than most, can talk about healthy relationships, consent and being a bystander,” Greene says. “But he is also a 16-year-old young man who loves the Browns.”
Greene understands how he feels. She grew up in Pittsburgh cheering for the Steelers. She says when two women came forward with accounts of sexual assault by quarterback Ben Roethlisberger early in 2010, her passion for the Steelers “definitely waned.” But it did not disappear. When the Steelers made the Super Bowl, she wanted them to win. She wonders, even now, if she was rationalizing to herself.
“I can identify with some of the [Browns] fans and what they are feeling,” Greene says. “It’s heartbreaking. You want to continue to love your team, but at the same [time] it’s conflicting, because there is a cognitive dissonance you have to fight.”
Greene is wary of jumping into the discourse of public opinion. She watched Watson’s defiant no-apologies-necessary press conference in August, but she is not interested in sparring with her city’s quarterback. “Our space is with survivors,” she says.
For many Ohioans, the Browns are not just a football team. They are a connection to home, a bridge between generations, a weekly fall ritual that makes families closer. Of course people don’t just want to give that up. Some of them will, anyway. Greene says, “It’s easy to forget about survivors and their experiences.” But there needs to be room for the rest to be decent humans and also cheer for their team.
Watson will surely be booed in Houston on Sunday. He will be booed for the many serious accusations about him, but also because he used to play for the Texans and now he does not. If Watson had said all along that all he wanted was to be a Texan, and the Texans stood by him, and he was playing for the home team this week … well, the reality of being a sports fan is that it is easier to take a moral stand against a player when he plays for the opponent.
Browns fans who cheer for Watson will not do so because they like Watson (even if some do like him). They will cheer for him because he is a Brown, and they think he can lead them to their first Super Bowl. There should be a way to cheer for the team and still be disgusted by the allegations against the quarterback. It isn’t easy. But at least one 16-year-old in Cleveland believes he can do it, and his mother can understand why.
