PEOPLE LIED ABOUT BY DEADSPIN — MYSELF INCLUDED — ARE LAUGHING TODAY
Anyone searching for flaws in a dying media industry should look to Deadspin, which spread untruths about anyone it wanted and has been laid off forever — making me ask what happened to the scammers
If we’re looking at published statements that recklessly disregard the truth — harmful, unprivileged, cock-and-bullish beyond the fatalism of Deadspin — I should own an NFL franchise today. Or I’d have bought that rat trap and blazed everyone working there. So many lies were told about me, my lawyer laughed and told me to treat it as “sub-literary satire,” or bullshit bursts. It was his way of saying I wouldn’t win because I was one of America’s biggest sportswriters and also a “public figure,” meaning the fabulists could defame me when they wanted.
Why? Traffic. Jollies. I made $800,000 a year and Deadspin tent dwellers made nickels. They came after me and said I was involved in a vicious Chicago bar fracas, which wasn’t true. They came after Hulk Hogan and published a sex tape, which shouldn’t have run and led to a jury awarding him $140 million. They came after Stuart Scott, before he died, to determine if he was flirting on the phone with a love interest, which wasn’t true. They came after Stephen A. Smith and said he was on a deathbed from eating too many snack foods, which wasn’t true.
They told so many lies about me, they were investigated in the only court case of my life, which proved they were telling more outrageous lies. They said I was mean to co-workers, which wasn’t true. They said I was blurry high at a sports team party, which wasn’t true. A writer implied I had videotaped an ESPN executive, John Walsh, who was busy that night handing his hotel room number to a woman at our dinner table, which violated every code about sexual harassment — and if my videotaping wasn’t true, Walsh was real. When the writer told the story in GQ, we settled for a retraction and held up the magazine’s print printing for a weekend.
For every story they managed to break — Manti Te’o was the one hit, though only because ESPN botched it — they were known across journalism for see-you-in-court falsehoods. So who’s the one laughing now with his lawyer? That’s me, knowing I still write what I prefer because I made serious money for three-plus decades without fabricating. This week, whoever remained at Deadspin was laid off by G/O Media, which sold the scraps to Lineup Publishing in Europe.
Deadspun.
“A zombie,” Slate calls it.
The site made minimal impact for a long time. The funeral is upon us, about 15 years too late. “Deadspin’s new owners have made a decision to not carry over any of the site’s existing staff and instead build a new team more in line with their editorial vision for the brand,” Jim Spanfeller, CEO of G/O, wrote in a memo. “While the new owners plan to be reverential to Deadpin’s (sic) unique voice, they plan to take a different content approach regarding the site’s overall sports coverage. This unfortunately means that we will be parting ways with those impacted staff members, who were notified earlier today.”
When I remember the scum days, I wonder who is left in 2024. Not A.J. Daulerio, who burned Hogan — and himself — and speaks about a lifetime of drug addiction and childhood molestation. Was he coked out of his mind when he was obsessed with covering me? Does he know I conferred with Hogan’s lead attorney, Charles Harder, about his sickening tactics? And not videographer Tim Burke, who faces 14 federal charges including conspiracy and wiretapping. And not Will Leitch, the original founder, who writes occasionally for offsites at New York Magazine and MLB.com after calling himself the crown prince of the industry. Why attack me? The clown prince attended the University of Illinois and grew up down the street, where an agricultural odor would drift across our press-box path when the Bears played there one season. I’d write about it and asked how anyone could study for school.
Champaign-Urbana-Leitch hated me. So you’re going to lie about me?
What blew me away were fellow sportswriters who couldn’t keep up with me, as I appeared on ESPN’s “Around The Horn” five days a week, saw the world as a national and international columnist and did regular radio programs. Why side with Deadspin? Why not work harder for your craft and your portfolio? Nah, they cracked social-media idiocies as the stoners and drunks kept lying. Ray Ratto was a Bay Area sportswriter who appeared to wear the same pullover sweater for decades.
Find a tailor, then rip me.
Those folks can’t latch onto Deadspin anymore. It’s defunct. So are they.
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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.