A collective legal action was initiated in an Arizona state court on May 26 by former assistant coach Don Shumpert and former executive assistant to Chief Operating Officer Jeremy Walls, Kendra Hogue. Reported by Theo Mackie of the Arizona Republic on Sunday, the lawsuit lists seven claims, including racial discrimination, retaliation, defamation, and constructive termination, which is when a worker is pushed to quit because of a hostile workplace.

The lawsuit listed owner Michael Bidwill, Walls (who has planned to step down from his role at the end of the 2026 season) and the Cardinals organization as defendants. Here’s what has happened since:

• June 1: In an attempt to quickly remove the legal action from state court, the defendants successfully transferred the case to the federal system.
• September 19: U.S. District Judge John Hinderaker, appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump during his first term, referred the litigation to the NFL’s arbitration framework, reasoning that the employment-based nature of the conflict legally bound the parties to an arbitral resolution rather than a trial. Hinderaker also wants a status report filed every 120 days and asked to be told once arbitration wraps up.
• NFL commissioner Roger Goodell gets to choose the arbitrator, a system that Mike Florio has long deemed “secret, rigged, kangaroo court of arbitration.”

The one with power gets to judge claims against themselves. Counterintuitive much?
Take a page from Brian Flores vs. NFL, which regarded the arbitration rules as a violation of the Federal Arbitration Act.

The ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denied a motion to compel arbitration of claims by plaintiff Brian Flores, who asserted race discrimination against the league and several teams. Meaning, it critically established that the league’s internal framework provided for arbitration “in name only” — the same framework that systemically gives the NFL Commissioner unilateral control over arbitrator selection, the process of proceedings, and other discretionary decision-making powers.

What does that tell us about this case?
With the state of Arizona under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, it favorably underlines an opportunity for the plaintiffs to appeal to a panel of judges to uphold their claims to a trial in open court rather than be forced into arbitration.

With a similar start as we saw in the Flores’s case, the Ninth Circuit has historically featured strong worker-protective precedents — be it ruling en banc in 2018 that employers cannot justify a pay gap between men and women by relying solely on the employee’s prior salary history or issuing pro-employer and pro-union ruling against worker with a long history of harrassing comments.

What does the lawsuit actually say?

Hogue’s side of the story is about a short stretch of time. She worked for the Cardinals from September 9, 2024, to November 8, 2024, and her claims focus on how she was treated in those two months.

“During the course of her employment, Hogue was subjected to a toxic work environment characterized by retaliatory behavior, managerial dysfunction, and mistreatment, which materially altered the terms and conditions of her employment,” the lawsuit says.

It also states, “As an African American woman, Hogue was subjected to disparate treatment.”

The filing doesn’t spell out what that treatment looked like, but it argues the defendants allowed “working conditions so intolerable that a reasonable person in Hogue’s position would have been compelled to resign.”

Shumpert’s complaint reaches further back. He joined the team in 2019 through the Bill Bidwill Coaching Fellowship and started as an offensive assistant.

According to him, head coach Kliff Kingsbury told him he’d been promoted to running backs coach in 2022. The team never explained the details of the new role, so he kept doing both jobs through training camp and into the season.

When he asked to raise his pay with Kingsbury and then general manager Steve Keim on September 26, 2022, they said they couldn’t increase it and told him to speak with Bidwill. He never got a raise. He was fired on October 3, 2022.

The suit says he faced “a discriminatory and hostile work environment,” where senior executives demeaned him openly and verbally. He has since been shut out of coaching and now works in financial services. It remains to be seen how this lawsuit will end for Bidwill.

Cardinals Release Statement

“The team strongly denies these claims and will prove they have no merit,” the Cardinals said in a statement provided to The Arizona Republic. “Because it is an active legal matter, the team will refrain from further comment.”

This isn’t the first time Bidwill has found himself in a legal fight, though. Former Cardinals executive Terry McDonough, his wife Lynette and daughter Caroline previously sued the team, its law firm Gallagher & Kennedy and PR firm Counterpoint for defamation.

That came after a 2024 NFL arbitrator ruled that the Cardinals defamed McDonough in a media statement accusing him of spousal abuse and neglecting his disabled daughter, which he denies. The team was ordered to pay nearly $3 million.

In 2025, federal judge Dominic Lanza dismissed the family’s defamation claims against the team and sent the law and PR firms’ claims to arbitration. McDonough’s other claims were dismissed too, and he had sought up to $125 million.