"We're in a state of disarray united by our darkest days."
Kim Mulkey is using some very old methods to try and discredit the news industry. A lawsuit will not be one of them.
This week’s soundtrack: Lucy Dacus - “Forever Half Mast”
(I know I promised the third in my three-part series on the second Trump administration today, but that’s going to have to wait until next week. I went with something else today because it’s a much more journalism-focused thing.)
You’ll be forgiven if you don’t follow the ins and outs of women’s college basketball, though this year has been one of the best years in recent history for it. Caitlin Clark has broken all kinds of records on her way to being the most-prolific college basketball scorer of any gender, the South Carolina team has been undefeated in regular season play seemingly forever (just two seasons, in reality) and Southern Cal’s emergence as a powerhouse.
It’s been a fun year. With all those fun stories, there had to be a villain and, of course, LSU coach Kim Mulkey is all too happy to be that person. Mulkey suspended her superstar forward Angel Reese early in the year for undisclosed reasons (the rumor mill vacillated between “bad grades” and “personal stuff”) and, late last month, she decided to go the “fake news” route.
Before the Washington Post published its profile of Mulkey’s coaching life and a look back at the relationships she’s had (it’s great. Give it a read), Mulkey tried to cut down the story. She spoke to the assembled media and accused the newspaper – most specifically, reporter Kent Babb – of being fabulists. She threatened a lawsuit that almost certainly will not happen.
I say that she won’t actually file the lawsuit because there is nothing in the story that is actionable. But she held a whole damned press conference, using a bully pulpit to try and get ahead of a story that paints her as a villain (a role she largely embraces, by the way).
(An aside: Media organizations have a lot of lawyers on staff. They vet everything over and over because getting sued by someone like Mulkey is expensive for a media organization. There are fact-checkers and safeguards in place to make sure that everything is vetted. The story is neither careless nor incorrect.)
Ultimately, this is an old move in the proverbial playbook. Mulkey is playing off people’s dissatisfaction with ~the media~ and, more so, their love of the nice feelings that LSU basketball gives them. In spots media particularly, every fan believes the announcer is against their favorite team and ESPN hates their favorite squads. It’s no particular surprise that Mulkey is a particular flavor of southern American conservative woman with a fanbase in one of the reddest parts of the country; “media” is a very dirty word down there.
This all came before the story published, of course. The paper published the story over the weekend, with the crux of the story being about not Mulkey’s relationship with her ex-players – though that is arguably 1B on the list of things explaining her personality – but rather the fact that she does not speak to either her father or her sister. Neither are “former disgruntled players” giving “negative quotes,” but rather family members.
Moreover, Mulkey also plays on people’s lack of familiar to the journalism process. As mentioned in an aside above, these stories are vetted quite a bit (both factually and legally), but the story was also years in the making. The notion that she was not able to talk to the reporter until the last-minute before the tournament is laughable; the reporter almost certainly sent questions to the athletic department at LSU and they, I’m speculating, ignored them or slow-walked them.
For sure, the story paints Mulkey as a borderline homophobe, a tough customer and someone who holds immaculate grudges (hence the family stuff). Brittney Griner is cited often (due to her prominence), but did not talk to the reporter for the story; much of the ex-player anecdotes come from players like Kelli Griffin, who clearly had a very bad time with Mulkey.
Again, the Mulkey supports will say that Griffin (and Griner, I guess) is just bitter or that the other unhappy players couldn’t handle the grind or that the paper was tring to produce a hit piece. On the former two points, they may be right; I don’t know the ex-players’ people’s brains and the story makes it abundantly clear that Mulkey is a successful college coach in the pantheon of Wooden, Auriemma, Krzyzewski, Summitt and Staley.
I say a lot that I’m not a lawyer (because I am not), but one of Mulkey’s phrasings really stood out and tells me that she absolutely will not sue: “a one-sided, embellished version of things aren't trying to tell the truth.”
Definitionally, embellished things are exaggerated, not made up. So, in this context, the “five or six years ago” that Mulkey’s sister claims is the timeframe by which they haven’t spoken is only, I don’t know, three or four. That is not an actionable thing. It means there is truth there.
The story doesn’t say “Kim Mulkey hates gay people.” It says a variety of things she said or was rumored to have said that imply she is a homophobe or, at least, uncomfortable with gay players at a Christian university like Baylor. It also quotes her directly when she said she was tired of hearing about said Christian university’s very public sexual assault scandal… while she was still coaching there. These are things that happened, they are not embellished.
When an uncomfortable (or even bad or even evil) thing happens or someone points out an uncomfortable thing that happened in the past, there are always a lot of people who want to add context that makes it seem like said uncomfortable thing was justified. The easiest example, for me, is chattel slavery in the United States and the cause of the Civil War. There are loads of people – including viable presidential candidates – who will try to add the variety of context to downplay the facts at hand and when someone points them out (former First Lady Michelle Obama faced backlash for deigning to point out that slaves built the White House); the pedants will accuse the messengers of lying or obfuscating or, in the case of Mulkey and Babb, “embellishing.”
I grew up in one of the most affluent communities in the United States, so my perspective is always a little skewed (skewed toward privileged people who can let things roll off of them), but I just can’t imagine caring about something like this if I’m Mulkey. She can say “scoreboard,” point to her championships and be done with it. That she cares what people think of her does absolutely against her brand of villainy – she dresses like Cruella DeVille, for chrissakes – makes no sense to me, but it appears that she may be less hard than she fancies himself to be.
Lulu Update
Whenever I buy some dumb hat, Lulu has the “honor” of showing it off for Instagram. As such, I purchased the new Washington Spirit cherry blossom hat and the reluctant model had to show it off.
