Fired female NFL referee hits back in lawsuit over | Sports News

Robin DeLorenzo, one of the primary three ladies to officiate an NFL recreation, has filed a lawsuit in opposition to the league alleging three years of gender-based discrimination, humiliation and open hostility that she says finally destroyed a profession she had spent twenty years building.

DeLorenzo’s journey to the NFL was one she had described with pure pleasure. Growing up, she adopted her father, Rich DeLorenzo, a high faculty official of 15 years, by the ranks of officiating, spending almost twenty years working her approach by high faculty and faculty soccer earlier than reaching the game’s highest stage.

When the NFL’s senior vice president of officiating allowed her father to personally ship the information of her promotion, it was a second neither of them forgot. “Once he gave me the news, my dad and I just stared at each other crying for about five minutes,” DeLorenzo advised NFL.com in 2023. “It was the most magical night.” It comes after Tom Brady’s request to return to soccer was blocked.

According to the lawsuit filed final week in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, that magic ended rapidly. DeLorenzo was despatched man-sized clothes she couldn’t correctly put on and was instructed to put on her hair in a seen ponytail by the opening in the back of her cap, “the implication being that this would make her look feminine and/or make her stand out as being a token female on the field.”

The repeated fixation on her look ultimately turned so relentless, the lawsuit says, that she needed to cut her hair off totally.

The lawsuit claims that an NFL officers crew chief advised then-Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin during coaching camp that DeLorenzo must be made to sing in entrance of everybody, as rookie gamers historically are, as a result of she was new to the league.

She says she complied, placing on what the lawsuit describes as “an utterly humiliating singing performance” in entrance of Steelers gamers, her whole officiating crew and her boss, who had promised to not document the second however did so regardless.

In the weeks that adopted, she says she was subjected to repeated shaming, harassment and profanity-laced verbal abuse from the identical crew chief, a man who had beforehand been accused of mistreating one other female worker. By the top of that first season, he had stopped talking to her totally.

In 2024, DeLorenzo was required to attend, over her union’s objection, a coaching alternative geared toward lower-level faculty officers studying the basics of the sport, one thing no male NFL official had ever been requested to do.

“It was a male power play that served its purpose of humiliating the plaintiff, shattering her confidence, and significantly hindering her NFL career,” the lawsuit said.

She was fired on February 18, 2025. The lawsuit, which seeks reinstatement and unspecified damages, frames her dismissal because the end result of a marketing campaign of discrimination somewhat than a real performance-based choice.

The NFL denied all allegations. “Ms. DeLorenzo was terminated following three seasons of documented underperformance,” a league spokesperson stated. “The allegations in this lawsuit are baseless, and we will vigorously defend against them in court.”