From the Locker Room to SCOTUS - Lisa Olson & Misogyny - a podcast by Andrew, Ed, and Zak

Welcome back to the Bill Bradley Collective, where this week we continue our season long feature on women in sports with a profile of sports journalist Lisa Olson and her place in the NFL’s problematic history of female disenfranchisement. Olson got her start fresh out of college at the Boston Herald, where she quickly ascended to cover the New England Patriots beat. Shortly into her first season, Olson was sexually harassed and psychologically assaulted by three Patriots in a disgusting locker-room incident, one seemingly abetted and endorsed by team higher-ups including owner Victor Kiam. The league investigation and subsequent “punishment” reflected an extreme dereliction of duty in meeting the severity of the player’s and organization’s actions and effect on Olson’s livelihood. If anyone came out punished, it was the victimized reporter, forced to relocate to Australia in order to continue her journalistic career for the better part of the next decade. What should have served as a positive tipping point for the advancement of women in sports journalism, was merely a harbinger of how the league would continue to regard women in their orbit for the next thirty-plus years. The NFL culture as it regards treatment of females is no less, if not more, dubious today than it was all the way back in 1990. How the league has handled Dan Snyder and the environment he has presided over in Washington; the failure to assess any culpability to Deshaun Watson amidst myriad credible assault accusations; Greg Hardy; comments by Cam Newton; all reflect an open hostility towards any and all women with experiences potentially damaging to the league’s mythical shield. Lisa Olson’s plight, which in a moral world may have snapped the NFL out of it’s abhorrent sexual biases and mores, instead shows that as everything changes, everything stays the same, and what has stayed the same is the continued degradation and abasement of women victimized by the league. Come for Olson’s profile in courage, stay for an NFL profile in ignominy, this week on the Bill Bradley Collective.

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