brucester001 wrote:
Against my better judgment, I'm going to respond to this, because I'm tired after YEARS of seeing people reference a caricature of me that bears no resemblance to who I actually am. You all have created someone to hate who doesn't even exist. And while I have spent years ignoring it, all I've found is that every year, more and more people believe it.
I was a competitive gymnast, tumbler, and trampolinist(?) from the time I was 2 years old until I was 16, when I got a devastating ankle injury. After that, I moved into competitive diving in high school. During that same time, I played volleyball and soccer - Varsity soccer for three years. I continued to play soccer in college on the school's club team, because we didn't have a woman's varsity soccer team at that point. I have coached girls and boys soccer, as well as my son's baseball team. When the baseball dads didn't believe a mom could contribute to coaching as the kids got older, I kept stats and convinced them to stop shaming the kids for walking. I have much much more experience with women's sports than any of the men who jump into my comments to tell me that I don't.
As for contributing to society, I clerked for the United Nations Centre for Human Rights in school. I was a public defender and represented criminal defendants who didn't have the ability to hire a private attorney. I represented battered women in getting orders of protections and divorces from their abusers. I represented sexual assault victims. I moved into private practice where I continued to represent, for prices that probably put me out of business, women who were in abusive marriages. I left law because the injustices and minutae of abuse were destroying my soul, not because I was a "failed lawyer."
As a journalist, I've tried to be true to what I've learned over the course of my life as a result of interacting with many different people, some very different from myself. And I've tried to fight the same fights, just from a different angle.
I've lost my job now three times in my life. Once as we found out on the air that the entire sports radio station was being shut down. Again when my sports radio station did multiple layoffs during COVID - because no sports - and when Deadspin was sold. If you want to make that about me being terrible at my job, knock yourself out, but know that it's not true.
As for the infamous piece about the 9-year old KC fan that everyone keeps screeching at me about, I wasn't even working that day, I saw it when it was published like everyone else. And my "defense" of it consisted of me refusing to throw a friend and colleague under the bus just because the same braying assholes who are always in my mentions demanded it.
I've been dealing with harassment out of massive scale from the same kind of men for the past 10 years of my life. There is not an accomplishment I can share or a place I can work that they don't bombard with negative comments and try to destroy. You can hate me all you want, I can be your favorite topic of conversation and your hobby, you can spend all your time scrolling through my timelines looking for things to hate me for and things that you can distort into something that they're not. But DO NOT tell me that I have never been involved in women's sports and DO NOT tell me that I've never contributed to society.
I have no doubt these guys will screenshot this and take things out of context and use it to harass me further, but I'm past caring. Do your worst. But just know that you are mocking a fictional character you've made up in your collective imagination.
What?
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Juice's Lecture Notes wrote:
I am not a legal expert, how many times do I have to say it?