The ‘Protect Women in Sports’ Gang Eyerolls at Uproar from AI Video of Sideline Reporter Being Slapped

As if we needed further proof, the right again this week revealed its pearl-clutching about the dangers posed to women in sports to be cynical, hollow and only pertinent when it can be used in the culture war.

Amid a brutal few days for female sports fans — a player twice accused of domestic abuse won the men’s U.S. Open, Sydney Sweeney stripped down to shill for a sports betting app, gruesome reporting revealed the complicity of the Barstool universe in the circulation of videos of college girls being raped — another controversy grew out of the University of Texas football team’s defeat of Ohio State on Saturday. After the game, UT coach Steve Sarkisian blew off ESPN’s Holly Rowe, a veteran sideline reporter, for the typical post-game interview.

Soon after, a queasily realistic looking AI clip of Sarkisian slapping Rowe made the rounds online. Evan Vieth, a reporter who covers the team, tweeted a clip of UT quarterback Arch Manning responding to his question about whether he’d seen any AI edits after the game, writing that Manning’s “answer is gold.” 

Manning responds, laughing, that he saw the edit of his coach slapping Rowe, saying “that’s a good one,” as reporters in the room guffaw along. (Vieth later apologized, though he did not delete the much-viewed tweet). 

About a day later, Manning apologized, writing on social media that he’d spoken to Rowe and promised to “do better” in the future. Rowe reposted the apology, adding text saying that she accepts his apology and is ready to move on.

This is the point in this ugly episode where figures on the right, Fox’s Laura Ingraham and Tomi Lahren and Outkick founder Clay Travis, among others, raised an objection. Not to the aping of violence, not to Rowe’s colleagues finding pantomimed violence against her to be hilarious, not to Sarkisian never addressing the controversy himself. They found a way to fault Rowe for supposedly being thin-skinned. 

“Embarrassing,” tweeted Ingraham. “For a veteran sideline reporter to extract an apology from a young player for an innocent offhand comment about an AI video is absurd.” 

“This shit sets female sports reporters back,” chimed in Lahren. “How fragile and ridiculous.” 

Travis wrote that “Holly Rowe should apologize for being a petulant brat after her Sark interview not Arch Manning for laughing at an internet meme mocking her and Sark.”

As the right has increasingly turned to sports, and often the women playing or around them, as grist for the culture war mill, they often do it under the guise of protecting them, or at least certain ones — from trans women, from Black women, from hysterical liberals. The latest round of that in the WNBA, premised on their outrage over the hypothetical future specter of a trans player in the league, resulted in dildos being thrown onto the court and former NBA players provoking W players mid-game. Of course, the ultimate goal here (aside from keeping the base nice and frothed up) is to punish the transgression of women infiltrating the male sphere of sports in the first place. 

Turning Rowe, who never spoke publicly about the video or subsequent press conference humiliation, into the antagonist of the story requires some mental gymnastics. What is the “shit” setting female reporters back here? It must be Rowe’s acceptance of Manning’s apology, the only action she took during the episode. It’s hard to imagine these three benevolently smiling upon Rowe had she not accepted his apology.

The vitriol that circulated with the video was hard to stomach. Many took it as an opportunity to degrade Rowe and her appearance, even as they insisted that their glee in watching a fantasy of a man brutalizing a woman was completely innocent.

In the right’s perfect world, such a thirst for violence against women who dare enter the male terrain of football would go unchecked. They’re nearly there; a 2019 USA Today investigation found that NCAA athletes — football players comprising the biggest share — had to be disciplined for sexual misconduct at three times the rate of the general student population. The NFL’s problem with sexual and domestic violence can hardly be called a problem, given how many players’ careers and enormous salaries are unaffected even by multiple (sometimes, dozens of) accusations. 

Based on their fixation on the WNBA, the protect-women-in-sports crowd might be interested to know that Los Angeles Sparks player Rickea Jackson’s ex-boyfriend, the Atlanta Falcons’ James Pearce Jr., was suspended for just eight games as he faces felony charges connected to his alleged ramming of Jackson’s car as she tried to flee to the police station for help.

Given the titanic amount of real violence against women that is accepted in the world of elite football, Ingraham, Lahren and Travis are right that a fake video pales in comparison. But keep these reactions in the back of your mind the next time Fox News needs something to distract from the Trump administration’s poll numbers, and reaches for female athletes. A female sports reporter silently endured her colleagues’, the athletes she covers’ and the internet’s delight in imaginary violence inflicted on her, speaking up only to absolve an athlete for his complicity. And still, it’s all her fault.