ESPN CRASHES IN FRAT-BOY SCANDALS, THANKS TO LEE FITTING AND JOHN SKIPPER

The Athletic covered Fitting’s misconduct as a “College GameDay” producer, reminding me of when John Walsh — who programmed “SportsCenter” — involved my restaurant table in his own sexual harassment

Just the other day, I walked past the Beverly Wilshire Hotel near Rodeo Drive, where Richard Gere hired Julia Roberts as a prostitute before John Walsh handed his room card to a woman at our dinner table. That intrusion still gives me the creeps. I was meeting with a Hollywood producer about a TV show he wanted me to co-host with Sean Salisbury, another former ESPN on-air personality.

Several people were with us, including agents and friends. Walsh made himself part of the scene when he teetered through the bar, yet somehow, he didn’t bother to say hello to me or Salisbury. Did he not recognize us from thousands of network appearances? Wasn’t Walsh a legend in Bristol, where his vision created “SportsCenter” as a nightly meeting place for sports fans? Couldn’t he at least wave?

Apparently not. He was interested in a woman sitting beside me.

Did he not know that handing his hotel room number to her might be considered sexual harassment? In due time, Bob Iger and Disney Company sent Walsh away, which was part of what The Athletic describes as a “boys’ club ethos” at the network for years. I’ve just finished today’s well-read report about Lee Fitting, the programmer who was fired by ESPN last year after his misconduct with female employees — including his demand that women on the road perform bed checks. Fitting was as big in the multiple structure as Walsh, leading the “College GameDay” program to massive levels of Saturday popularity.

And in the middle of both scandals was the network boss, John Skipper, who also was my former boss. Watching Walsh at work in front of us — while a friend of Salisbury was filming his act at our table — I decided to call Skipper. He immediately got back to me. I wanted to know why a top executive could slip into wrongdoing, within a public setting in Beverly Hills when ESPN was so quick to get rid of employees. I’d been away from the “Around The Horn” show, after a domestic abuse matter in which we prevailed in a civil case and received an expungement from a judge. I was thankful and knew my situation was far apart from the workplace and had nothing to do with Walsh’s presence.

Little did I know how wretched they would become.

Months later, Skipper met with me at the Nobu restaurant in Malibu. He asked me to spend a month in Charlotte and interview Michael Jordan. When I tried to set up contact time, I was told ESPN’s Wright Thompson already was in town to do the piece, forcing me to apologize to a wonderful author while needing a new piece for a website. Kobe Bryant sat down with me for a half-hour. The story ran. What was next?

Nothing. After a Skipper invitation, I arrived in Connecticut for bullshit interviews and was told by a female executive, “You have to be perfect to work at ESPN.” Um, how many non-perfectionists have come through the network gates? Would she like me to count the number? My appearance was a Skipper fraud while a magazine editor suggested I should be nice to him, not realizing Skipper would be fired from the network years later after a cocaine scam. My arrival was a joke, an attempt to thank me for not reporting Walsh to Disney. It didn’t matter as the Deadspin site published the Walsh video anyway, a glimpse of why ESPN should crumble. When the editors contacted Walsh, he ripped me.

Me.

Under chairman Jimmy Pitaro, ESPN has trashed social politics and runs stale, gambling-filled programming. Skipper wouldn’t survive. Fitting wouldn’t survive. Maybe commentator Pat McAfee slurs bosses, but the mistreatment of women apparently has lapsed. The place is beyond inspirational help. The network was most efficient a decade ago, sadly, when Fitting was allowed to malign women under his thumb. Skipper should have put an end to the gross shenanigans. Instead, in The Athletic piece, he wondered about people — such as me — who came forward.

“It is a hard thing to do. You’ve got to decide. I mean, if you’re exposed to something, maybe it is somebody who is going to decide what your bonus is next year,” Skipper said. “If it’s a colleague, you know, it’s wrong, but people still have the old ‘I’m not going to tell on anybody’ thing. And then, until a company establishes a track record of actually holding the people responsible, you always fear you’re basically going to get into the bad parts of being a whistleblower. Will these people resent you and (then) they’re unhappy?”

The whistleblowers always win, even if they lose in the job experience. Since that day at the Beverly Wilshire, I’ve been blackballed from all but one media job after decades of healthy and prosperous work. Why do you think enemies such as Jerry Reinsdorf have trashed me in the media? Skipper has spent time through his DraftKings-fed host, Dan Le Batard, in ripping me to shreds and lying about my career. I keep writing nonetheless. In The Athletic piece, Skipper describes Fitting as “a golden boy” and a “gregarious, social, friendly guy.” When I speak to classes, I talk often about Skipper.

Avoid him at all costs, I say.

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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.