Why won't more men in sports media address sexual assault?
Ben Roethlisberger's past of sexual assault can't be overlooked when we evaluate his legacy. Why does it fall primarily on the same outlets and writers to remind everyone else?
As I combed through the stories capturing the lasting impact of Ben Roethlisberger, the 39-year-old Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback who played his last NFL game on Sunday, I noticed a disturbing yet predictable trend. The writers who accounted for Roethlisberger’s past of sexual assault, who refused to gloss over the allegations made against him in 2008 and again in 2010, were almost entirely women. The stories came from Defector and Deadspin and outlets that specialize in calling out bullshit. They were penned by experts of the trade like Jenny Vrentas—a long-time Sports Illustrated scribe whose wholesome retrospective on Roethlisberger was her first for the male-dominated sports section of the New York Times—and managing editor of TheFootballGirl.com and freelance writer Melissa Jacobs.
As sports media consumers, we’ve become reliant on columnists like the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins, The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill, Deadspin’s Julie DiCaro and USA Today’s Christine Brennan and Nancy Armour to provide sage commentary on the intersection of sports and gender violence. (That doesn’t mean it’s always women providing the necessary context. Drew Magary’s piece in SFGATE, Thank you Ben Roethlisberger… for being a real jackass, was as biting as any, and Seth Wickersham’s ESPN+ story delved briefly into the Roethlisberger’s dark past.)
These writers, however, should not be the only ones unafraid to go there. For every moving personal essay from Diana Moskovitz about Roethlisberger’s tainted legacy, there’s countless men in the industry who would prefer to look the other way and move on.
One sports writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette punctuated a column about Roethlisberger’s “off-field transformation” throughout his career with these words: “Mission accomplished. It has really been an extraordinary journey.” Another Post-Gazette writer dove into fans’ “complicated emotions” before Roethlisberger’s final game, but made no mention of sexual assault. An article in The Athletic traced the QB’s path from draft night to the playoff loss against the Kansas City Chiefs, presenting praiseworthy quotes from former teammates and coaches, but spared no paragraph for the hotel room or the bathroom of a college bar. The Washington Post used the word “regrettable” in describing his actions in a timeline of Roethlisberger’s career, even though he’s never expressed remorse for either incident. ESPN announcer Brian Griese referred to the quarterback’s off-field behavior as “mistakes” that he’s learned from. Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth spent the final minutes of Roethlisberger’s career dissecting his greatness while a word cloud containing “family man” and “growth” was displayed on the screen. After the Steelers season came to an end, Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes said of his competitor, “He did it the right way” and CBS Sports used that quote in a headline.
I don’t know what the correct way to cover Roethlisberger over the past decade-plus would have been. Obviously, if you’re a Pittsburgh beat writer or an NFL play-by-play announcer you can’t ignore him. You have to talk about his talent and his leadership and his ability to win a third Super Bowl and all that without re-litigating the events of Milledgeville and Lake Tahoe. You have to move forward at some point, because the team chose to keep him around and his body stayed upright and functional for another 11-or-so years. But if, at the very end of Roethlisberger’s time wearing an NFL jersey, it is your job to summarize his career, in full, and you deem it unnecessary to include the sexual assault allegations in that narrative, you’re not covering the man; you’re celebrating him.
And when there’s an overwhelming amount of sports media professionals who are patting Roethlisberger on the back on his way out, it falls on the same writers as always—a vast amount of whom are women—to remind their fellow (mostly male) journalists that’s not what the job entails.
Very good question.
The more things change…