Someone recorded a video of ESPN’s Rachel Nichols from inside her hotel room in Walt Disney World. Four edited clips of the video were sent to Deadspin, which reports that it is clear the video is recorded without Nichols’s knowledge.
Four Deadspin reporters, Jim Rich, Eric Barrow, Cameron J. Phillips, and Julie DiCaro, write that Nichols appears in the video having a private telephone conversation with an unidentified man. During the call she discusses private ESPN personnel decisions. The reporters received the videos with a note saying their contents would expose Nichols as “back-stabber and phony ally.”
“Nothing in the videos Deadspin viewed show Nichols saying anything that could be construed as either a back-stabber or phony ally,” the report states.
Sources told Deadspin that the full video is thirty minutes long. The site chose not to publish the videos because they are manipulated and out of concern for Nichols’s privacy.
The video is taken from the video feed Nichols has been using to broadcast The Jump while she is quarantined waiting for the NBA season to resume.
“Rather than alerting Nichols that her video stream was still live or simply shutting the feed off on ESPN’s end, according to sources, an unidentified ESPN employee began to record the video feed on a phone, cut it up and disseminated it to others in the company,” Deadspin writes. “Deadspin is not certain whether anyone inside ESPN sent the recording of the videos to our reporter.”
The site reached out to Nichols for comment. She had not responded before the column was published.
“We are extremely disappointed about the leak of a private conversation. It’s indefensible and an intrusion on Rachel’s privacy,” ESPN said in a statement to Deadspin. “As for the substance of the conversation, it is not reflective of our decision-making on staffing assignments for the NBA, which has largely been driven by the circumstances of the pandemic.”
