Dianna Russini has been out of a job since April, but Dave Portnoy would fix that today.<\/p>\n
The Barstool Sports founder told Us Weekly<\/a> he\u2019d bring the former Athletic NFL insider on board without a second thought, a stance that puts him well out ahead of his own network. Back in April, days after Russini\u2019s resignation, Barstool\u2019s Dan \u201cBig Cat\u201d Katz told Front Office Sports he wasn\u2019t even sure she\u2019d want to work at Barstool<\/a>, given some of the jokes the site had made about her situation, though he figured she\u2019d land somewhere doing independent media.<\/p>\n \u201cNo-brainer, if she wanted to work here, we\u2019d do it,\u201d Portnoy said.<\/p>\n Russini resigned from The Athletic<\/a> on April 14, a week after Page Six published photos of her and New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel at an Arizona resort. Both denied wrongdoing<\/a> at the time, with Russini saying the photos didn\u2019t represent \u201cthe group of six people who were hanging out during the day\u201d and Vrabel calling any suggestion of impropriety \u201claughable.\u201d The Athletic\u2019s Steven Ginsberg said leadership had initially accepted Russini\u2019s detailed explanation before new questions emerged, widening the internal investigation. Russini resigned before that review concluded, though Ginsberg told staff the standards review of her published work would continue regardless.<\/p>\n Portnoy didn\u2019t treat any of that as disqualifying.<\/p>\n \u201cAn affair is not like a murder. It\u2019s bad, but I\u2019m not in the family. She\u2019ll land somewhere, and you know, if people who have affairs are never allowed to work again in this country, you\u2019re gonna lose a significant amount of the workforce,\u201d Portnoy said. \u201cIt is obviously really sad, but at the same time, that\u2019s not like a capital offense that should end somebody\u2019s professional career.\u201d<\/p>\n The New York Times ran a lengthy profile<\/a> on Russini\u2019s career and resignation last week, the first real update on her situation since April, reporting that she\u2019d been paid close to $800,000 a year as The Athletic\u2019s senior NFL insider<\/a>, making her one of the highest-paid journalists at the Times Company. The profile opened with an anecdote Russini herself had told on a radio appearance months earlier, about FaceTiming an NFL head coach during a traffic stop to get out of a ticket. Bodycam footage of that stop surfaced days after the profile ran, and it told a different story<\/a>: seven minutes of video with no FaceTime call anywhere in it, just Russini name-dropping her NFL access and showing the officer text messages with Vikings coach Kevin O\u2019Connell before he let her go with a warning.<\/p>\n Russini has said almost nothing publicly since her resignation, the lone exception being text messages she apparently believed were off the record, quoted in that same Times profile after she asked not to be included and was told no such agreement had been made. In them, she referred to herself<\/a> as a \u201cformer journalist.\u201d<\/p>\n