One of the first women to work as a referee in NFL games is suing the league in federal court, saying she was discriminated against based on her gender. In her lawsuit, filed last week, Robin DeLorenzo said the harassment started soon after starting her job, and it continued throughout her time with the most lucrative professional sports league in North America. The discrimination included not having proper cold-weather gear for winter games, requests for how she wore her hair, and being told to "shut your fucking mouth."
The complaint, filed in a Manhattan court, lists 12 claims under federal and state laws, all a form of either gender discrimination, harassment, or retaliation. It names the NFL as well as two of DeLorenzo's former supervisors as defendants, former NFL officiating chief Walt Anderson and former NFL official Byron Boston, who also supervised her. HRD America first reported reported about the complaint. In a statement to Football Zebras, the NFL said DeLorenzo was fired "following three seasons of documented underperformance," and the allegations in the lawsuit were "baseless."
DeLorenzo's lawsuit asserts otherwise. "[DeLorenzo]'s career was not derailed by lack of ability, effort, or dedication," the complaint said. "It was destroyed because she is a woman in an institution that, despite its slogans, is structurally unwilling to treat women as equals."
According to the complaint, DeLorenzo began her officiating career in New Jersey high schools, then moved up to Big Ten football, where she was the first woman to officiate Ohio State vs. Michigan as well as the Fiesta Bowl. When the NFL hired her in 2022, she was one of just three women to ever work as NFL referees.
The problems, her lawsuit said, began soon after she started her new job.
At a mini-camp in Houston, then-NFL officiating chief Anderson told her to keep her hair in a ponytail, even though DeLorenzo said she preferred to keep it tucked under her hat. At a Pittsburgh Steelers training camp, she felt pressured to participate in a rookie hazing ritual—singing embarrassingly in front of everyone—even though she didn't want to, and Anderson recorded her without her permission. DeLorenzo, the complaint said, eventually convinced him to delete it.
Anderson also kept insisting that DeLorenzo put her hair in a ponytail, and it made her so uncomfortable that she told two different people about the issue. Anderson eventually stopped discussing her hair, but DeLorenzo "felt that she had no choice but to compromise to appease Anderson and avoid retaliation," the complaint said. So she put her hair in a bun.
DeLorenzo said she also had to buy her own uniform, because the gear issued by the NFL was cut for masculine bodies and didn't fit her properly; she would then iron on an NFL logo patch to make it work. The uniform issue meant DeLorenzo never had cold-weather gear that fit her properly, the lawsuit said, so it was unusable. She finally got some cold-weather clothing that fit near the end of the 2022 season, but for the entirety of her time with the league, she never received any cold-weather undergarments that she could wear. When she asked for help, the complaint said, DeLorenzo was told they were working on it.
For her first season, DeLorenzo was placed on the John Hussey crew, where she was "exposed to ongoing and persistent abuse and harassment by Hussey," the lawsuit said. (Hussey is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit.) DeLorenzo reported this to the NFL's communications specialist, who told Anderson. Some examples given in the lawsuit of what she experienced while on this crew include:
- When she asked Hussey for advice on how to handle Anderson's requests about her hair, he told her she was crazy for not changing her hair.
- Hussey regularly told her "shut your fucking mouth, RD."
- She was reprimanded for asking a colleague for guidance after a fight broke out during the game. In fact, the complaint said, Hussey "later called her to berate her and make sure she knew she got her teammate in trouble and that it was all her fault." During that call, Hussey told her to more than once to "shut [her] fucking mouth."
- By the end of the season, Hussey had stopped talking to her.
Hussey recently had been accused of mistreating a female employee before DeLorenzo joined his crew, and the lawsuit said that DeLorenzo never should have been assigned to his team. (The resolution of the prior accusation isn't given in the document.)
For 2023, DeLorenzo moved to a different crew, where she was forced to be the "veteran" line of scrimmage official after they lost their more senior line judge for the season due to medical reasons. When DeLorenzo met with Anderson and several other people over Zoom as part of her end-of-season review, Anderson told her "she needed to join the Frozen play on Broadway, and learn to sing 'Let it Go,' because her 'issue' was a 'mental one.'"
That offseason, the NFL pressured DeLorenzo into attending a low-level clinic that "literally served no purpose other than to humiliate her and hinder her NFL career," the lawsuit said. (Football Zebras reported that it had an editor who could confirm seeing DeLorenzo at the Gulf-Atlantic officiating clinic that year.) At the same year-end review where the "Let It Go" comment was made, Byron Boston told DeLorenzo she should go to this collegiate-level clinic because another female official had refused to go and she was about to get fired. (DeLorenzo's union successfully challenged her having to go to the clinic, the suit said. She got reimbursed, and she was taken off probation a year early.)
For her final season, DeLorenzo was moved to another crew. (Her previous position was given to Anderson's son, the lawsuit said.) A new grading system also was put in place for referees. But many of the graders were "men with close ties to Anderson and Boston" who also knew about her grievance, the complaint said. These men gave her marks that were "objectively inaccurate," the document said, while her male counterparts were "treated more favorably under the season three grading system." The lawsuit also asserts that Anderson continued to "have a say" in the grades, despite having left his position to avoid a conflict of interest with his son now working as an official.
DeLorenzo was fired on Feb. 18, 2025.
A copy of the lawsuit in full is below, or you can read it by clicking here.
