Mike Vrabel’s Arizona Affair
Waking up and checking our phones is now just a constant stream of misery so I cannot tell you how delightful it was to have a stupid, low-stakes drama story take over the feed for a day. It would appear, without official confirmation, that Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel and Senior NFL reporter for The Athletic Dianna Russini are possibly having an affair.
The two were spotted at a luxury resort in Sedona being all cute together. They locked hands, they hugged, hung out in swimsuits in a hot tub and next to each other, you know, stuff professional colleagues do as part of the job. They were also there with friends! Those friends were just off-screen, also having a good time. That’s the story they went with, apparently.
Now we don’t have any evidence of them sucking face or worse, but you generally don’t hang out in the same hot tubs and lock hands with someone you have a strictly professional relationship with. The absence of friends in the pictures also isn’t evidence that friends aren’t there, but it sure as hell looks like two married adults hung out with each other in a way that was beyond normal levels of professionalism. Are they fuckin? Probably.
These are two consenting adults ruining nobody’s relationships but their own, and normally, it would be funny to just laugh at them getting caught like the new Coldplay Couple, but Russini’s position as a reporter adds a frustrating wrinkle to this. If they are having an affair, it means she committed one of the Big Sins of journalism: fucking your source. Naturally, this will now cast doubt on all of her reporting, and internet sleuths are already at work combing through her previous reports and podcast appearances for anything that feels like a piece of the puzzle. Some of it is pretty weak, some of it is a genuine side-eye.
All of these little mentions and anecdotes could be jokes, but now we are stuck wondering. Russini’s entire career is now going to be subject to whispers and jokes, and whatever hard work she actually does will be forever discounted. If the affair is false, this sucks for her. If true, she at least partly deserves it, but every other female reporter in the business has a right to be furious with her for it. She potentially broke an ethical boundary.
Mysogynists and dipshits already make jokes and often sincerely believe women with high positions in industries slept their way to the top. Russini possibly just confirmed that stereotype on herself, and these dopes will use her as an example to discredit and hurt other female reporters. I remember how much bullshit Erin Andrews went through at the height of her popularity, to the point where she got fucking spied on. Mina Kimes’ mentions are full of misogyny, even when she just posts a cute picture of her dog.
This is what sucks about all of this. Russini, if guilty, can be argued to deserve to have her career questioned. That’s the bed she made. No one else in the industry deserves to be questioned because of her actions. If Russini is actually innocent here, then she is also a victim, because now everything she worked for is up in smoke due to a misunderstanding. Gamergate started because of a false accusation about sleeping with someone for a good review, this shit can get so stupid and unfair.
Vrabel will be fine, outside whatever personal drama it causes. He’s not a reporter so his only ethical failing here is cheating on his family, which is his own personal problem that isn’t really our business. He’ll just get hit with jokes for a while.
Either way, it doesn’t look good for the two. To my knowledge, we haven’t had any of these “friends” confirm Russini/Vrabel’s story, which seems like it would be easy to do if true. A lot of people have speculated that the pictures might be from a private-eye, possibly hired by the family of one of them. If one or both of them end up divorced soon, that’s probably the cleanest sign the rumor is true.
………..I’ll be honest, in Current Year, it is so very hard to give much of a shit about this.
Yes, it there was unauthorized adultery going on (don’t kinkshame!), then this is bad. Repercussions should be had. Bad, do not do it again.
…but at the same time… *gestures vaguely at the state of the general world*
Private citizens with no political power and near-zero social power doing something untoward? Fuck, why should anyone care, our tax dollars are murdering Iranian school children, why the fuck should anyone give a shit about this tabloid crap?
You could say that about *any* sports story in general. The Cleveland Browns go 17-0 and win the Super Bowl? Why should anyone care? There’s crime and disease and poverty in the world! There are absolutely many millions of people in the world that have come to exactly that conclusion, and they don’t pay any attention to pro sports because the entire enterprise is trivial and dumb.
If people are going to decide to care about professional sports to begin with, then we’ve already dealt with that argument. We can be concerned about homelessness, fentanyl, the Kardashians, climate change, microplastics, inflation, chemtrails, lizardmen, genocide, war profiteering, Zuckerberg’s haircut, AND sports all at the same time. We contain multitudes.
And if the public is going to care about sports, then we might reasonably care about sports reporting. We might care, at least a little, about the compromised journalistic ethics of a NYTimes reporter, so that we can properly think critically about their reporting, for which we, the public, are the consumers. I dispute the claim that these are “private citizens”. If you are a reporter for the NYTimes or an NFL Head Coach you are out there in the public eye on purpose, and you have no reason to expect that something like an extramarital affair would be kept quiet.
And maybe if we are letting our kids watch the NFL, we might want to know about what kinds of shitheels the players and coaches and owners are in their private lives, so that we can make sure not to put these people on a pedestal or look to them as role models. I enjoy watching and reading about plenty of characters, real and fictional, who are utterly reprehensible but nonetheless entertaining.
I 100% support everything you said, with the addition that Vrabel has to be missing QUITE a few brain cells to think this was something he’d be able to get away with. Vrabel, you JUST got pounded in the Super Bowl, my dude. Your face is QUITE recognizable. Even if – EVEN IF – it’s all exactly what you say – which is just WEIRD as hell – it’s mind boggling that you couldn’t foresee people running with it like this.
I’m all for it, though. Robert Kraft deserves as much piss in his cereal as this world can provide, and if an embarrassing Super Bowl loss gets followed up with more egg on his face like this, bring it on.
I don’t personally care. Consenting adults and all that jazz.
But the public in general cares a LOT about sports.
There is a lot of money and influence tied up in sports. Sports figures go on to become celebrities and politicians. Sports reporting is a part of all that. If Dianna Russini wants to have an affair with a particular person that happens to be a sports figure, that is fine. But ethical journalism demands she recuse herself from stories that involve people she is personally involved with. That is the problem.
It’s about ethics in journalism, only this time we’re not gaslighting when we say that.
Toon15 up there already did a good job explaining the flaws with your perspective on that, But I will say I think you missed the bigger point of the blog post so I’ll repeat it: This isn’t just a couple of consenting adults being dumb. Russini’s status as a reporter and how her actions will affect other female reporters goes into major problems for women in the industry, and we already had a cultural example of how a false accusation of unethical reporting in an unimportant hobby space lead to a massive culture war that has helped put us in our current position (Gamergate). That actually does matter, it’s worth caring about, even if it’s not as important as climate change or Palestinians being bombed or the housing crisis or whatever the fuck else. We can care about multiple things at multiple scales at the same time.
Also, its funny, and it’s nice to read a silly story about two adults being stupid in the midst of *everything*
[rapid-fire whistle] [multiple flags pile in]
[suddenly, Guns Hochuli appears in his capacity as Fallacy Ref]
One-Downmanship Felony. Defense. Coming in and yucking offense’s anything, be it a yum or an already-yuck, by claiming others elsewhere have it worse, for all neither can do anything about it, does the precise thick end of crap-all to help anyone.
Fifteen yard penalty, loss of down.
I view your site as a respite from reality for a few minutes each post and am grateful for you. 🙂
This sure started out like a Letter to Penthouse
“Couldn’t have been me, honey; you’ve ruined me for women!”
“We were method actors, practicing a play.”
“I was giving her a deep tissue massage.”
“I tripped and fell, several times in succession.”
3 simple words: “I am gay!”
Dave, I think the people (me) want to know is where this puts Vrabel on the Scumbag Meter.
Dumb Mistake Zone for now
I know debauchery amongst the moneyed NFL crowd isn’t surprising, but between Belichick, Kraft, and now Vrabel, what’s in the water In Foxborough? It’s clearly not respect women juice.
It’s a shame the internet is going to make this about a woman trading sex for scoops and not a man trading scoops for sex. Kinda undercuts the whole coach persona Vrabes is trying to build when he’s out here not respecting his highest commitments and selling out the team.
Drake Maye don’t do it, I know your babyface ass just got married and we someone not cartoonishly piggish to maintain the illusion of Patriots “Do yer Jerb” branding.
Gamergate started because of a false accusation about sleeping with someone for a good review,
You mean a TRUE accusation. Which they admitted to.
It was a false accusation, there wasn’t even a review published by the person she supposedly slept with in the first place, it was just a bitter ex writing a bitter post about a relationship that went sour and loser gamers using it as a springboard to air out culture grievances
Not to mention, wasn’t the relationship between her and the writer in question done like three years before she even released her game? The timeline doesn’t line up when actually taking a good look at what the bitter ex’s claiming, but losers were chomping at the bit to push back against diversity in gaming and he gave them an viable-looking excuse to be shitty.
The entire scandal was proved bogus really fast but it gained so much momentum that by the time it did get proved as bullshit it didn’t matter
The same people that were criticizing that Jaguars reporter for telling Liam Coen to “keep your head up” are no where to be found for this lmao
A friend of mine from back in TN gave me the impression that it was pretty common knowledge he had a side relationship there, too. I remember back in the early days of the predators NHL team, a high ranking member of the coaching staff had a pretty torrid love affair with a good friend of mine. I bet it’s super common in sports and just not reported on because media don’t want to lose coverage.