Flores appeared on NPR’s “The Limits” podcast with ESPN personality and former NBA player Jay Williams and chronicled the events of the past few years that led Flores to filing the class-action suit.

MORE: NFL’s Rooney Rule explained

Chief among them were the texts between Belichick and Flores. In them, Belichick congratulated who he thought was Brian Daboll on landing the Giants head coaching job, only to have mistakenly texted Flores. Flores said the exchange inspired him to finally take legal action. 

“It was a text message from Bill Belichick that confirmed a lot of the things that I believed were going on for Blacks, minorities in the hiring process. That was the tipping point for me,” he said. “That confirmation was something that — I felt like I had to say something. I couldn’t stay silent because, you know, Dr. Martin Luther King said, you know, a long, long time ago, there comes a time where silence becomes betrayal. I wasn’t going to do that.”

RESPONSES TO FLORES’ LAWSUIT:Giants | Stephen Ross | John Elway

Flores had yet to be interviewed for the Giants opening at the time he received Belichick’s texts and he wouldn’t be for another three days, he said. He later received a text from Belichick congratulating him on getting the job. To Flores, though, this showed that Belichick is involved behind the scenes and has undue influence on other teams’ decisions.

In the interview with Williams, as in the lawsuit, Flores said that he’s not the only Black coach to have received this treatment or felt as though they were merely a box to be checked when it came to the Rooney Rule.

MORE: What were Bill Belichick’s texts to Brian Flores?

It remains to be seen what the next steps will be for Flores, the NFL and the other parties involved. Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio speculated that the NFL could avoid a trial by making a motion in court to have an arbitrator appointed by commissioner Roger Goodell hear the case, citing the terms of the standard contract for NFL coaches. Arbitration would essentially keep testimony from being made public, Florio noted.