Dianna Russini announced Monday that she will return to media with a podcast for offshore gambling company BetUS. In her first interview since resigning from The Athletic in April, Russini delivered two messages.
First, her new show, “The Russini Report,” will air each Wednesday. Second, she is a victim of “heartbreaking” lies.
Let’s focus on that second point.
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“The best way to describe what the last six months were like for me is heartbreaking,” Russini told People. “At the beginning of this, it was a nightmare.”
“The lies became so out of control,” she continued. “This was a runaway train, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Once [my husband and I] realized nothing was going to stop this, it became unhealthy for us to read it because it wasn’t helping us heal. It was piling on and adding to what we were already dealing with.”
What lies? Who told them? What is the truth?
Russini’s account omitted answers to all three questions. Instead, she offered an appeal for sympathy and avoided any accountability.
For someone whose job relies on providing inside information to the public, that’s a damning response to a seven-month-long scandal.
At a minimum, Russini violated her former employer’s ethical standards. The Athletic said so in August.
“Russini’s relationship with Vrabel was in clear violation of The Athletic’s standards,” Mike Semel of The Athletic said after an investigation into her reporting. “Regardless of whether the relationship was romantic, it was a breach and should have been disclosed.”
That assessment leaves no room for dispute.
In April, Page Six published photos in April showing Russini alone with Vrabel at an adults-only resort in Arizona. She claimed, a day after the report, that they happened to run into each other while she was on a hiking trip with female friends.
Russini could have substantiated her explanation by providing photos from the supposed “girls’ trip.” She didn’t.
She seemingly wants us to accept that she participated in the first-ever girls’ trip that didn’t produce a single photo.
Not one.
After the initial report, various outlets obtained other photos of Russini with Vrabel over the course of at least seven years, dating to her time as an NFL reporter for ESPN.
Notably, TMZ reportedly obtained documents showing that Russini and Vrabel rented a private boat together in Tennessee in June 2021. Russini was around seven months pregnant with her first child at the time.
Maybe there is an innocent explanation for all this. It’s hard to imagine, but we cannot say for certain. The optics are troubling.
In any event, Russini asks that you, please, focus on her denunciation of the coverage instead.
“When the Page Six item first appeared, The Athletic supported me unequivocally, expressed confidence in my work and pride in my journalism. For that I am grateful. In the days that followed, unfortunately, commentators in various media have engaged in self-feeding speculation that is simply unmoored from the facts,” Russini said in her resignation letter.
“Moreover, this media frenzy is hurtling forward without regard for the review process The Athletic is trying to complete. It continues to escalate, fueled by repeated leaks, and I have no interest in submitting to a public inquiry.”
The media did not place her at the resort with Vrabel earlier this year or at their other encounters over the years. She did that.
The media also didn’t escalate the scandal through a series of strange responses.
The first came just a week after the initial report, when someone leaked to Page Six that Russini had saved a car crash victim.
The headline: “Dianna Russini mounts daring rescue of elderly man, dog trapped in car crash a week after Mike Vrabel scandal.”
The unusual story attempted to cast Russini as a heroine to an old man and his dog. Unsurprisingly, it did not improve the public’s increasingly contemptuous view of her.
Presumably, the free edition of ChatGPT could have offered better advice than she received from those around her, including her CAA agent, Matt Olson.
She has since hired a high-priced crisis manager, Melissa Nathan, who repped Blake Lively. Based on the People interview, her new approach isn’t much better.
In the interview, Russini came across as ignorant, if not delusional.
From the beginning, she has conducted herself as if she could outsmart the rest of us. So far, it hasn’t worked. The fact that not a single notable woman in sports media publicly defended Russini during the scandal underscores that.
Whatever unnamed “lies” she speaks of – and maybe there are some out there on Reddit – they are not the reason she had to leave a premier job and resort to working with a gambling company that is not licensed in a single U.S. state.
She is the reason she had to do that.
The photos of her cozying up with Vrabel at the resort while reporting on his team’s interest in AJ Brown are not a lie. The photos of her kissing Vrabel six years ago in New York City aren’t either. Nor was the boating trip. Neither were the reports she published at The Athletic about Vrabel, without disclosing her relationship with him, romantic or not.
Russini isn’t the victim of lies. She’s a victim of her own arrogance. Her arrogance is why she thought she could abandon boundaries with a head coach in the first place.
Her latest insistence on portraying herself solely as a victim has compounded the damage. Her refusal to address the obvious has only deepened suspicions.
She now says she plans to become a role model for other women.
“I really hope that I can be someone other women see: you can pick yourself up, get back in there and not be afraid,” she told People. “Because if you just do the work — and I hope to continue working at a high level — that’s all that’s going to matter. And I hope that quiets the noise.”
In actuality, Russini offered female reporters a cautionary tale about how not to cover the NFL.
Russini opened the promotion for her new project by saying she spent “20 years chasing the stories everyone is talking about.”
And yet, the story everyone is still talking about is the one she hopes a plea for sympathy will quiet.