Whatever actually happened, Elijah is right about the response. DL should have reached out to him instead of going full denial. This "notes" thing is obviously going to result in nothing because you're not going to document a racist comment. Unless you're Danny Ferry of course.
For me personally, it's not the best look for DL to outwardly call Elijah a liar. It would have been better to reach out to Elijah and hear his side of the story. I said this before, but being a nice well mannered guy really doesn't make me believe that DL could be incapable of this. If you've been on the receiving end of racist comments, you wouldn't be surprised that it came from someone who is powerful and "well respected".
My speculation is that both men believed they are telling the truth, perhaps there was a miscommunication.The best thing to do here was to solve with Elijah and put in the policies to ensure that something like this doesn't happen again. Elijah's obviously not being malicious here. Why not hear him out?
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that for players in the league, it's probably not the best to meet these concerns with immediate denial and without reaching out. There are a lot of people here that seem to "believe" DL over Elijah for one reason or another. I bet there are a lot of players who find it much easier to believe Elijah, especially if they know him personally. There's a good chance that they've been told something sideways from a "well respected" person before.
Danny Ferry was very well respected. Didn't stop him from saying an outwardly racist comment on a conference call. Was about 6 years ago too, which says something about the league culture at the time. I said this earlier, most important thing is to make sure that the current culture doesn't allow this. Hopefully this doesn't turn into an endless he said she said thing and we get some positive change out of it.