Question: Is Steve Phillips like David Letterman? See this video and get ready for my poll.
It was announced that ESPN Baseball Analyst and former New York Mets General Manager Steve Phillips was fired Sunday night. Phillips was involved in a sex scandal regarding a three-week-old affair he had with ESPN Production Assistant Brooke Hundley which turned into "Fatal Attraction" when he tried to break off the relationship.
Steve Phillps and Brooke Hundley
Steve Phillips is married to Marni Phillips and the two have four kids. She filed for divorce September 14th.
According to the Huff Post, ESPN claimed...
"Steve Phillips is no longer working for ESPN," network spokesman Josh Krulewitz said in a statement. "His ability to be an effective representative for ESPN has been significantly and irreparably damaged, and it became evident it was time to part ways."
This story, which hit last Wednesday, has taken the Internet by storm with its details. There's the letter written by Brooke to Marni Phillips and more recently a report that that the whole affair started when according to Hundley, Phillips had got her drunk and then made a move on her after waiting for her to come out of the women's bathroom at a bar.
Brooke Hundley filed a restraining order against Phillips after he went to the police, but in reading the text from the Examiner it seems like she's lying about a few thing to protect herself.
She writes:
While at work in mid July, after work Steve bought me a strong drink and then cornered me while coming out of the bathroom with no one in sight trying to persuade me to come to his hotel suite to spend the night.
I told my supervisor who told me to "Get used to it." And to keep it to myself. He proceeded to text me on a regular basis with inappropriate things. I tried to get him to stop and told others but he didn’t and finally I gave in and agreed to see him a few times after work in parking lots.
Someone at work found out and call his house. Then he began to spread word that I was just the office slut and ruining my reputation. He continued to text me however about getting together on our next business trip and I begged him to please be honest about what happened with us that he had pursued me and that I was not this poor character as he had stated.
Over the phone he threatened me stating that if I spoke a word of this to his wife that he would ruin more than just my reputation but could easily get me fired. At that point I told him I cannot continue on like that and if he couldn’t come clean to everyone that I would have to tell. I wrote a letter and left it on their doorstep to his wife.
I then thought twice about it and asked a young woman to retrieve it for me. She drove up in my car and he saw the car and immediately tried to ram into her over and over. He obviously thought I was in the car and now I’m scared where this might go next.
What's interesting and not surprising to me is that her ESPN supervisor told her to "get used to it" and I believe that because it affirms something I wrote when ESPN's Harold Reynolds was fired in 2006 for hugging a white girl.
Turns out I was right! But I knew that.
I wrote then that relations between ESPN analysts and interns were common, but it was "OK" for the white guys to be in them because (from people I talked to in 2006) it was white male and white female going after each other, if you will.
Reynolds is black and also married and was fired for a hug while I was told some other ESPN men were having full on sexual relations with female employees. I wrote that Reynolds ran into a kind of racial boundary issue that's grounds for another blog post because times have changed in three years.
It takes two to tango and for every one of these romances that goes bad, there are some that go well and unreported.
Boy, folks howled about that but the truth hurts. Deadspin's now former editor Will Leitch and I had fun with that one at the time.
What really happened is known mostly to Reynolds but he sued and settled with ESPN, which means that somewhere along the way he wasn't the only person who was to blame for something.
The focus should be on ESPN's culture. Instead it's on people as others try to criticize those like Phillips, Letterman, and Reynolds as if those throwing the criticism are totally innocent.
They're not.
It's widely known in the sports and entertainment industry that women who work for those organizations try to get dates with executives and players and actors they work with. Don't even try to argue with me on that one. Some of the women are interns right out of college working without pay, and they chose to do so.
But what happens when a story like this comes out is "The Big Lie" is put in place to cover it up - where the man is the one going after a date with the woman and she has done nothing to pursue a relationship - and we never get to the real story or a real conversation about how our society really is.
It would help because then we could have some real talk that render stories like this not popular. You know? Right now, it's volcanic on the Internet because it shows how we really are versus The Big Lie. The truth is "The Big Lie" keeps the gossip train going.
Someone emailed me asking if I wanted to buy a photo of Marni Phillips.
NO I DON'T!
Steve Phillips is out of a job now, but what about Brooke Hundley? Is she still in the employ of ESPN? For some reason they've not issued a statement on her at least as of this writing.
Brooke Hundley has an interesting resume in that she, according to the New York Daily News, worked for ABC Studios as an intern and also Jimmy Kimmel Live, but I don't know if she reported directly to Kimmel.
As you may remember, Kimmel himself was the focus of a little inter-office romance himself, but this one's gone well so far.
In the end, it's all just bunch of gossip done by people - including commenters - who have their own interesting stories. So what. The reality is Steve Phillip should not have cheated on his wife, period. All the other stuff is conversation but Marni Phillips is the victim here. Steve owes a lot to her and to his kids.
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