Barstool Sports is the fastest growing sports media enterprise in the United States right now with its street value estimated at $100 million.
Founded by Dave Portnoy in 2003, the sports, gambling and pop culture blog is known for being aggressively misogynistic and completely unapologetic about it.
But Barstool Sports stooped to new lows with how they despicably treated a recently deceased 23-year-old college student.
Barstool Sports humble beginnings stemmed from when founder Dave Portnoy had a blog called “sports/smut” and then it eventually evolved into a semi-mainstream website with a social following of more than 1.5 million people.
Now it’s a mixture of pointless, mindless uninteresting podcasts, blogs and a boring sports reality show called “Stoolies,” which so happens to be the name they gave to their loyal followers.
To give you an idea of the lows that Barstool Sports will go to be relevant in today’s media market; they consistently go out of their way to defame and slander women in aggressive ways.
Last year, the website giant was put under the knife because comedian Miel Bredouw blasted them for stealing and uploading one of her videos from two years ago in a weird and desperate way of attempting to humiliate her. A few days later, Barstool Sports committed one of the biggest social media purges in Twitter history.
According to Social Blade, a social media-tracking site, Barstool Sports deleted tens of thousands of tweets early last year, which was the result of 70-percent of the company’s total posts – an energy that would’ve likely been reminiscent of a Wall Street firm shredding all of their documents before the FBI showed up to raid the office.
One would think they had learned their lesson but that’s absolutely not the case.
Barstool Sports published a crude slut-shaming post about Mackenzie Lueck, a 23-year-old female college student, who had just been missing for over 10 days. Salt Lake City police were investigating a person of interest in the case and they had already deemed her a missing person.
They published a bunch of raunchy disgusting jokes at Lueck’s expense. Shortly after it was posted, Lueck was reportedly found dead. She was allegedly kidnapped and then brutally murdered.
And then Barstool Sports deleted the blog post after the announcement. After all, it was the “least” they could do.
The post’s author, Francis Ellis, made sure to highlight that she’d been active on “sugar daddy dating websites” and began digging through her Instagram account where he spotted a mention of a Barstool Sports podcast – featuring young women who engage in bawdy sexual conversations for effect.
You would think they’d be flattered, but that certainly wasn’t the case – Ellis doubled-down on his disgusting and self-aggrandizing antics.
The podcast is mentioned both in the headline and the blog itself, which ended with Ellis glibly mocking the low number of followers Lueck had amassed, adding his “thoughts and prayers.”
Portnoy was reached for comment and called it an “absolutely insane move” by Ellis to publish the blog—Ellis allegedly did so without running it by a single editor beforehand—Portnoy apologized, offering his “thoughts and prayers” to the victim’s family. Though Portnoy claims Ellis “meant well” and wasn’t aware of Lueck’s death, his “ridiculous lack of judgment” meant Portnoy was compelled to fire him.
Later that day, Portnoy fired Francis Ellis.
It may have been due to the mounting pressure to do so, but how in the world does a $100 million company like Barstool Sports permit such a relaxed atmosphere to allow things like this to happen.
Normal media companies have a hierarchy and nothing is published unless it’s with an editor’s approval.
Barstool Sports should be held accountable for this disgraceful event and firing the employee is just too little, too late.