Waking up and checking our phones is now just a constant stream of misery so I cannot tell you how delightful it was to have a stupid, low-stakes drama story take over the feed for a day. It would appear, without official confirmation, that Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel and Senior NFL reporter for The Athletic Dianna Russini are possibly having an affair.
The two were spotted at a luxury resort in Sedona being all cute together. They locked hands, they hugged, hung out in swimsuits in a hot tub and next to each other, you know, stuff professional colleagues do as part of the job. They were also there with friends! Those friends were just off-screen, also having a good time. That’s the story they went with, apparently.
Now we don’t have any evidence of them sucking face or worse, but you generally don’t hang out in the same hot tubs and lock hands with someone you have a strictly professional relationship with. The absence of friends in the pictures also isn’t evidence that friends aren’t there, but it sure as hell looks like two married adults hung out with each other in a way that was beyond normal levels of professionalism. Are they fuckin? Probably.
These are two consenting adults ruining nobody’s relationships but their own, and normally, it would be funny to just laugh at them getting caught like the new Coldplay Couple, but Russini’s position as a reporter adds a frustrating wrinkle to this. If they are having an affair, it means she committed one of the Big Sins of journalism: fucking your source. Naturally, this will now cast doubt on all of her reporting, and internet sleuths are already at work combing through her previous reports and podcast appearances for anything that feels like a piece of the puzzle. Some of it is pretty weak, some of it is a genuine side-eye.
All of these little mentions and anecdotes could be jokes, but now we are stuck wondering. Russini’s entire career is now going to be subject to whispers and jokes, and whatever hard work she actually does will be forever discounted. If the affair is false, this sucks for her. If true, she at least partly deserves it, but every other female reporter in the business has a right to be furious with her for it. She potentially broke an ethical boundary.
Mysogynists and dipshits already make jokes and often sincerely believe women with high positions in industries slept their way to the top. Russini possibly just confirmed that stereotype on herself, and these dopes will use her as an example to discredit and hurt other female reporters. I remember how much bullshit Erin Andrews went through at the height of her popularity, to the point where she got fucking spied on. Mina Kimes’ mentions are full of misogyny, even when she just posts a cute picture of her dog.
This is what sucks about all of this. Russini, if guilty, can be argued to deserve to have her career questioned. That’s the bed she made. No one else in the industry deserves to be questioned because of her actions. If Russini is actually innocent here, then she is also a victim, because now everything she worked for is up in smoke due to a misunderstanding. Gamergate started because of a false accusation about sleeping with someone for a good review, this shit can get so stupid and unfair.
Vrabel will be fine, outside whatever personal drama it causes. He’s not a reporter so his only ethical failing here is cheating on his family, which is his own personal problem that isn’t really our business. He’ll just get hit with jokes for a while.
Either way, it doesn’t look good for the two. To my knowledge, we haven’t had any of these “friends” confirm Russini/Vrabel’s story, which seems like it would be easy to do if true. A lot of people have speculated that the pictures might be from a private-eye, possibly hired by the family of one of them. If one or both of them end up divorced soon, that’s probably the cleanest sign the rumor is true.
