IMAGINE KIM MULKEY VS. JEFF BEZOS IN A COURTROOM BATTLE OVER BABBGATE
Is sports journalism’s future at stake as the LSU coach threatens legal action versus the Washington Post, whose writer — Kent Babb — is ready to run a piece that could ruin either Mulkey or the Post?
I have been attacked by people lying about me. I’ve also been attacked by people who think I’m lying about them. So it would be in Kim Mulkey’s keen interest to be accurate about a “hit piece,” supposedly prepared about her by the Washington Post. If she is hiring “the best defamation law firm in the country,” she’d better have her facts straight when she enters a courtroom.
Assuming she is correct — not easy when she wears pink ostrich feathers with a tweed floral blazer and pointed-toe pumps — then Mulkey has shown the galvanized sports world how to deal with harmful reporters. In today’s troubled media sphere, she has chosen to ambush the Post about a story yet to be published. Way back in the 1970s, when journalism mattered, Watergate defined the newspaper.
Welcome to Babbgate.
Nothing frightens owners and publishers, such as Jeff Bezos in this case, more than a protracted visit from a libel protection shop. Now that Mulkey has emerged, during the biggest-ever NCAA basketball tournament in the women’s division, the piece by sportswriter Kent Babb will be intensely scoured by millions of readers. The Post’s reputation, which has been one-upped by the New York Times, will be at stake when the story is posted.
And so will Mulkey’s standing as LSU’s coach, where her 2023 national championship may be undone by whatever naked truths are included in the story. Does it involve her support of Donald Trump, such as her potential visit to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6? She appears guilty of telling Brittney Griner she couldn’t publicize her gay sexuality — or as Griner said, “It was a recruiting thing. The coaches thought if it seemed like they condoned it, people wouldn’t let their kids play for Baylor.” When Griner was detained in Russia, for foolishly placing vape cartridges with cannabis oil in her luggage, Mulkey was asked to respond because a reporter hadn’t seen comments from her.
“And you won’t,” she said.
From her shots at other programs to her political choices to her clothing options, Mulkey is so bathed in perpetual controversy that her new stance makes sense. Of course, she would use a press conference Saturday to thrash the Post and all but ruffle Woodward and Bernstein. She thinks Babb will recklessly disregard the truth. If he does, she’ll match her status as a public figure against their attempts to lie. Would she win? And if she does, is sports media ruined?
“The lengths he has gone to try to put a hit piece together,” Mulkey said. “After two years of trying to get me to sit with him for an interview, he contacts LSU on Tuesday as we were getting ready for the first-round game of this tournament with more than a dozen questions, demanding a response by Thursday, right before we're scheduled to tip off. Are you kidding me? This was a ridiculous deadline that LSU and I could not possibly meet, and the reporter knew it. It was just an attempt to prevent me from commenting and an attempt to distract us from this tournament. It ain't going to work, buddy.”
Babb has won awards and never has been known for jugular grabbing. The closest example was in his book about Allen Iverson, when he suggested the star was drunk when he fired his infamous workplace comments “about practice.” Mulkey also was upset about a “hit job’’ he wrote on Brian Kelly. It was little more than an account about LSU’s football coach landing $100 million in Baton Rouge, where he makes $24,657 in one day in a stadium area where a Black state house district averages $24,865 in annual income. Did Kelly come off as a Midwesterner who tried a fake Cajun accent for a while? Someone from Notre Dame who didn’t grasp Louisiana?
He did. But it was not a trashing as much as a social commentary. “Hit piece?” Babb wrote on social media after Mulkey’s bombs, with a link to the Kelly story.
“I'm fed up, and I'm not going to let The Washington Post attack this university, this awesome team of young women I have, or me without a fight," Mulkey said. “I’ve hired the best defamation law firm in the country, and I will sue the Washington Post if they publish a false story about me. Not many people are in a position to hold these kinds of journalists accountable, but I am, and I'll do it.”
Did Babb tell Mulkey’s former players that he would accept their anonymity? I was in that position when The Athletic tried to write a profile about me, and I asked the respectable author why several people wouldn’t speak publicly. That’s one way of allowing lies into a piece. The story about me never ran — and Mulkey might have the same goal.
“When my former coaches spoke to him and found out that I wasn't talking with the reporter, they were just distraught, and they felt completely misled," said Mulkey, adding that the Post “contacted them and offered to let them be anonymous in a story if they'll say negative things about me.
“But you see, reporters who give a megaphone to a one-sided, embellished version of things aren’t trying to tell the truth. They’re trying to sell newspapers and feed the click machine. This is exactly why people don’t trust journalists and the media anymore. It’s these kinds of sleazy tactics and hatchet jobs that people are just tired of.”
We all have a right to be tired of media sleaze. We also can be angry at coaches who don’t answer a list of questions.
Mulkey vs. Bezos.
Kent Babb, you’d better do more than dot the i’s and cross the t’s.
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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.