Then there’s the other side of being a woman personality on sports TV. The scary side.
In a piece by Dylan Murphy of Sports Grid, Michelle Beadle talks frankly of a stalker who followed her to the Super Bowl in Indianapolis and then to West Hartford, Conn., when she was working at ESPN.
From the story:
These increasingly alarming messages were coupled with sporadic packages. Dave, who Beadle later learned was from Cincinnati and lived with his mom, sent her “Cincinnati-type things.” Namely, chili and barbecue sauce. Many of the packages never made it to Beadle thanks to ESPN’s security staff (none were sent to her home address), but ultimately some snuck through. One especially weird box comes to mind.
“I remember one time getting this package full of papers, like little index cards, cut out pictures of either religious themes or sports,” she said. “I mean it was like one after another, it had to be a hundred cards in there. I mean, what in the hell?”
And…
After the night came to a close, Beadle noticed a frightening reply from Dave that escalated the intensity of the situation ten-fold.
“I saw something he said on Twitter, where he said ‘Hey I met Jay Crawford [SportsCenter anchor] tonight in West Hartford,’ and I was like, ‘What?’ I come to find out that he was walking around West Hartford, ’cause I said I was having a girls night, and he was trying to find us.”
Beadle immediately alerted everyone she could at ESPN, because Dave had driven across the country to deliver a Valentine’s Day present. In particular, she went to an ESPN employee on the security side with whom she had spoken to before, and he pulled a few strings at the FBI to have Dave handled through a more direct means: a visit to his Cincinnati house. Two FBI agents showed up at his door to frighten him into the shadows, informing him that there was no relationship between the two and all communication between himself and Beadle had to cease immediately.
“They just scared him,” Beadle said. “They were like, ‘Look, this ends now. Stop sending messages, stop tweeting, stop everything. He sent a final tweet being like, “I am no longer allowed to speak with you, best of luck.’”
Read the entire piece. It puts some perspective on what some of these high-profile women have to go through.