Subway Investigating Response To Past Complaints About Jared Fogle



It goes without saying that Jared Fogle’s recent admission to being a serial child pornographer and child exploiter has caused considerable blowback for Subway. Now, amid reports corporate officials were tipped off to Fogle’s debauchery not once, but twice, prior to Fogle being finally tracked down, Subway is investigating what its officials knew and when they knew it.

Jared Fogle at a 2007 event in Boston (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
Jared Fogle at a 2007 event in Boston (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Subway has been in full damage control mode since a former Subway franchisee revealed that Fogle had told her via text message in 2008 that he’d paid a 16-year-old girl $100 for sex. The woman claimed to have alerted two levels of management at Subway’s parent, Doctor’s Associates. According to her lawyer, corporate officials determined nothing improper occurred since Fogle wasn’t technically a Subway employee. Soon after the current scandal broke, officials at Doctor’s Associates claimed that they had no record of the woman’s complaint.

However, Subway was all but forced to begin investigating the matter anew when Rochelle Herman, a former journalist who reportedly made the tip that ultimately brought down Fogle, claimed she’d alerted Subway about inappropriate comments from Fogle as early as 2010. In a statement, Doctor’s Associates said that once it got word of Herman’s complaint, “we began an investigation that is ongoing.”

Herman said Fogle had made “inappropriate sexual comments” about her children, who were 12 and 13 years old at the time, respectively. Some of the things Fogle said were so vile that, as Herman put it, “there’s not even a word in the dictionary for how horrible it was.” Herman, who had known Fogle for the better part of a decade, said that he wanted her to put cameras in her kids’ rooms. She never received any word from Subway beyond a notification that her online comment had gone through.

Herman got the last laugh, though. In 2011, after Fogle told her that he thought middle school girls were “hot,” she alerted the FBI. She wore a wire and recorded several phone calls while the FBI was investigating Fogle. Based largely on Herman’s evidence, the FBI and Indiana State Police raided Fogle’s house in July, obtaining much of the evidence that led Fogle to plead guilty.

Subway really had no choice but to take this step. Simply put, had Subway not gotten out in front of this and it had later emerged that corporate officials knew about these complaints and did nothing, it would have been the end of the company. Based on what is already known, this situation is firmly within “what did they know and when did they know it” territory.

Veteran defense attorney Matthew Malloy told Business Insider, which first broke the news of the 2008 text message exchange, that Subway should have begun actively investigating Fogle as soon as it got a complaint. Almost as importantly, Malloy said, Subway should disclose its process for reporting such allegations. “What are they doing to make sure this doesn’t happen in the future?” he asked.


For this investigation to have any credibility, anyone and everyone who knew about these complaints and failed to pass them up the chain of command or report them to the proper authorities must be fired. No ifs, ands, or buts. Depending on the circumstances, it’s possible that somebody, or a whole lot of somebodies, may need to have lawyers on speed dial.

Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook. Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello.