DeLorenzo spent two decades grinding through the high school and college ranks, weeping tears of joy with her father the night she finally got the call to the big leagues. That dream rapidly devolved into a daily nightmare. The league refused to provide her with properly fitting women’s gear, forcing her to buy her own clothes and iron on the NFL patches. Worse, Anderson allegedly demanded she wear a ponytail sticking out of her cap so everyone on the field knew she was a woman.
The harassment peaked during a 2023 training camp with the Pittsburgh Steelers. According to the filing, DeLorenzo’s crew chief told Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin that she needed to sing in front of the entire team like a rookie player. Cornered and pressured, she delivered an utterly humiliating performance in front of the players and her male colleagues. You can easily imagine the suffocating tension in the room as her boss filmed the spectacle, completely ignoring his promise not to record her. By the end of that season, her crew chief refused to speak to her entirely.
“It was a male power play that served its purpose of humiliating plaintiff, shattering her confidence, and significantly hindering her NFL career.”
— DeLorenzo’s Legal Complaint against the NFL
The NFL claims they fired DeLorenzo in February 2025 due to three seasons of documented underperformance. The league officially calls her allegations baseless. But DeLorenzo’s camp argues the grading system was rigged from the start. Male officials allegedly received higher grades on identical calls, and evaluators loyal to Anderson deliberately tanked her scores. The league even forced her to attend a lower-level college officiating clinic in 2024—a massive insult that no male NFL official had ever endured. Her union fought that mandate and won.
This lawsuit hits Commissioner Roger Goodell’s desk at a brutal time. The league is currently negotiating a massive labor deal with the referees union ahead of the 2026 season kickoff. Discovery in this civil case could unearth internal emails, biased grading rubrics, and the actual video of the Steelers camp incident. The NFL will likely push for a quiet settlement to avoid dragging their inclusion initiatives through the mud, but DeLorenzo wants reinstatement, back pay, and damages. She wants her whistle back.
