Dave Portnoy says he’d hire Dianna Russini at Barstool: ‘No-brainer’

Credit: Mitsu Yasukawa / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images; Scott Utterback/USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Dianna Russini has been out of a job since April, but Dave Portnoy would fix that today.

The Barstool Sports founder told Us Weekly he’d bring the former Athletic NFL insider on board without a second thought, a stance that puts him well out ahead of his own network. Back in April, days after Russini’s resignation, Barstool’s Dan “Big Cat” Katz told Front Office Sports he wasn’t even sure she’d want to work at Barstool, given some of the jokes the site had made about her situation, though he figured she’d land somewhere doing independent media.

“No-brainer, if she wanted to work here, we’d do it,” Portnoy said.

Russini resigned from The Athletic on April 14, a week after Page Six published photos of her and New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel at an Arizona resort. Both denied wrongdoing at the time, with Russini saying the photos didn’t represent “the group of six people who were hanging out during the day” and Vrabel calling any suggestion of impropriety “laughable.” The Athletic’s Steven Ginsberg said leadership had initially accepted Russini’s detailed explanation before new questions emerged, widening the internal investigation. Russini resigned before that review concluded, though Ginsberg told staff the standards review of her published work would continue regardless.

Portnoy didn’t treat any of that as disqualifying.

“An affair is not like a murder. It’s bad, but I’m not in the family. She’ll land somewhere, and you know, if people who have affairs are never allowed to work again in this country, you’re gonna lose a significant amount of the workforce,” Portnoy said. “It is obviously really sad, but at the same time, that’s not like a capital offense that should end somebody’s professional career.”

The New York Timesran a lengthy profile on Russini’s career and resignation last week, the first real update on her situation since April, reporting that she’d been paid close to $800,000 a year as The Athletic’s senior NFL insider, making her one of the highest-paid journalists at the Times Company. The profile opened with an anecdote Russini herself had told on a radio appearance months earlier, about FaceTiming an NFL head coach during a traffic stop to get out of a ticket. Bodycam footage of that stop surfaced days after the profile ran, and it told a different story: seven minutes of video with no FaceTime call anywhere in it, just Russini name-dropping her NFL access and showing the officer text messages with Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell before he let her go with a warning.

Russini has said almost nothing publicly since her resignation, the lone exception being text messages she apparently believed were off the record, quoted in that same Times profile after she asked not to be included and was told no such agreement had been made. In them, she referred to herself as a “former journalist.”

Whether Portnoy’s offer amounts to anything remains to be seen, but it’s not the only one on the table. Fox Sports Radio host Jon “Stugotz” Weiner said back in April he had a seat waiting for her on his show whenever she wanted it. For now, Russini hasn’t taken anyone up on it.

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