DeAndre Levy testified before a congressional subcommittee on brain injuries that the Detroit Lions tried to silence him from speaking publicly about CTE.

“The moment I said anything about it, I had two calls telling me I shouldn’t talk about it,” Levy told the committee, via Kyle Meinke of mlive.com. “I don’t know if it was because it was CTE, or if it was because it’s just the general NFL rule of, like, only football. Only talk about football, only think about football. I posted simply the research . . . and I was told not to talk about it the first day it was out. And I’m just, like, you know, it could have just been locker room culture. Nobody wants to talk about anything other than football. But it didn’t sit well with me when I’m talking about brain injuries.

“It’s my brain. It’s not my shoulder; it’s my brain. It controls everything I do; it controls everything we think, everything we feel. And if I don’t have the right to speak about that as a player, I think it really speaks about the culture of the NFL, of what those conversations are. I think that’s indicative of the conversations that we don’t hear. The closed-door conversations between owners. They still are trying to find ways to silence us.”