Pablo Torre Finds Out - All-American Grift: We Investigated Trump's Favorite Sports Troll

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

She notoriously parlayed a tie for fifth into a star turn on Fox News. But who's funneling money into the radicalization of Riley Gaines? And what's her dark past lurking beneath the surface? In partnership with PTFO, Madison Pauly from The Center for Investigative Reporting spent six months wading through the trans-athlete debate — then washed up with former teammates, NBA owners, merch... and a Supreme Court case that could change everything.• Read the full profile at Mother Jones(Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic. The views, research and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out and Mother Jones and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So the reason you're hearing and seeing me right now is because we have a bit of incredible news to share. Our show, Pablo Tori finds out, was not only named one of the best of 2025 by Apple Podcasts, but our episode, The Silent Superstar and the Rod and Apple Tree, which was, you know, the whole investigation and aspiration in Kauai Leonard and the Clippers, was also chosen as one of Apple Podcast's best episodes of the year. You can check both of those things out, the best shows and the best episodes list right now in the Apple Podcasts app. So thank you so much for listening. Thank you for making clear what Apple Time, Apple Time actually means. And today, you are going to find out what this sound is.

Where's our beautiful, great swimmer? Gaines, where's Gaines? Look it, come up here. Will you please come up here? Come up, come up. This is a great champion. And she was beating everybody, and then one day she looked over and said, that's the largest human being I've ever seen.

right after this ad. This is really cool. I've never done anything like this before. I've never done a podcast before. Oh, my God. Well, okay. Apologies in advance. No, no, no, no.

So I want to explain for our audience here. Let's just get into it. I want to explain for our audience here that you, Madison, are joining us from where? I'm in San Francisco. I'm in the Center for Investigative Reporting offices. The Center for Investigative Reporting is, of course, the parent company of Mother Jones,

which is one of the most venerable journalistic institutions in America has been that way for decades upon decades upon decades. And it's really cool to partner with you guys on a story that I have been trying to fit into our strange docket because I think that this investigation that you did for us is the thing that has been lurking underneath the surface of like the most explosive topic in sports and politics for, what, four years, four quite consequential years at the very least at this point?

Yeah, even more. I think is when this all started. And it has been a wild ride. And I'm excited to dig into this part of it. Yeah. So this is, if nothing else, a profile. It's a profile of, I think, what might be the main character of this movement

that has dominated American politics. So who is the face of this movement, Madison? Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States. The poster child, the it girl. The Regina George of this movement is the 24-year-old who clapped longer than anyone else at a White House ceremony in February during Hail to the Chief as Trump walked in. Riley Gaines. Right there, like off to the right of just the center of the frame in a resplendent white outfit is Riley Gates.

She's got her real MAGA look going. She's got the full face of makeup, long, wavy. blonde hair, and she's really become so recognizable over the last three years, at least if you're in the Fox News audience. Thank you very much. This is a nice crowd, isn't it, huh? You've been waiting a long time for this. So have I.

Actually, it was so ridiculous. But here we are. So this is Donald Trump preparing to sign his executive order, keeping men out of women's sports, a threat to defund schools that let trans girls play on the girls team. Which means that the girls who are assembled there in the front row wearing their uniforms and their medals, these are the people that Donald Trump and Riley Gaines are saving. They're protecting them, these victims of the trans movement. Right. Donald Trump is here to protect women, is the really clear message of this photo

out. And for people who don't know what Riley Gaines is. as lore is, her origin story. Donald Trump is very helpfully here to fill us in on the injustice that Riley Gaines suffered when she was a college swimmer. The league forced her to share a spot on the podium with a male swimmer who took her trophy

while the media celebrated this stolen glory. And Riley is just a tremendous athlete and it was a very unfair situation. I watched it. A lot of people watched it. It was ridiculous, frankly. But I want to thank Rayleigh. She really has been in the forefront. People that aren't that well-versed in this

would say that she was the leader. And great job, Riley. Thank you very much. Riley Gaines, you may also recall from the time that Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez dunked on her because of the whole thing where she, you know, actually just finished in fifth, Madison. Yeah, she came in fifth.

And in defense of Riley Gaines here, Coming in fifth in the NCAA Division I National Women's Swimming Championship is a big deal if you're a college woman swimmer. It's the top meet. So people love to call her mediocre, make fun of her for coming in fifth, troll her, troll a troll. But it is a big deal to have swum this meet. And she famously, very famously tied for fifth with one Leah Thomas. And we can go back and forth, of course, about the competitive advantage debate and the question the science they're in. We've done episodes on that on this show.

But the larger argument that that platform, that literal platform, became politically, was even more dire, right? I mean, the claim that Riley Gaines goes on to make, that this room that this president goes on to make is that female athletes are not only losing to the Leah Thomas's of the world, the transathlete. They're being victimized. I asked Brett Farv, what do you make of all these transgender athletes, men invading women's sports, trans-invating women's sports, trans-invating. or trans infiltration of women's sports put women in actual danger. Trans women movement is actually anti-woman. 100%. Especially when it comes to sports, 100%.

Absolutely. You hear it all the time, the idea that trans women are, quote, unquote, invading women's spaces and putting them at risk. It's been incredibly effective as far as changing policy. there are the last time I checked 29 states that have gone ahead and banned trans women and trans girls from women's athletics. That's huge. That's obviously more than half the country. After this executive order that we just watched, we have the NCAA banning trans athletes. Transwomen specifically, we have the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee doing the same thing. It's really been a massive win for Riley Gaines.

and her allies on the policy side. And as far as public opinion goes, obviously the Republican Party has really banked on this issue to win elections and poured money into anti-trans advertising a lot of it about sports. But funny enough, like the thing that I want to do here, though, is actually introduce people to Riley Gaines. I actually want them to understand the story that she doesn't quite want to tell,

but we had you investigate. I mean, the cast of characters we are going to encounter today involve Simone Biles, the Philadelphia Eagles, the Orlando Magic, and Charlie Kirk. Also, I have been promised spreadsheets, Madison. I've been promised tax forms. There are a lot of spreadsheets and a lot of tax forms. Get ready. This is my kind of episode.

So this is also one of those episodes where I end up listening to an audiobook. and I do need to now share a bit of what I learned while listening to Swimming Against the Current by Riley Gaines. Swimming Against the Current is about standing up for reality, facts, and common sense. It's my story of how I became a passionate advocate, not only for myself as a collegiate athlete, but for every woman whose future is at risk of being jeopardized. One of the two dozen people I talked to for this called sports a gateway drug to the anti-trans movement. people start getting interested and getting hooked, thinking about some of the real and legitimate questions about the science of trans athletes. But as part of digging into that, they get sucked

into this online sphere and this rhetoric that this is about sports to immediately, every woman's future is at risk from transgender women. That slide, that pivot, that's what really is Riley essence or the essence of her message. I often think of politics now as just like a storytelling contest. And so when I hear the story that Riley Gaines is telling in this book, it reminds me that the most helpful thing often

when it comes to a movement like this is to find a victim to empathize with. And here you have a young girl born in Nashville, Tennessee in the year 2000. And I tried it all. Softball, basketball, horseback riding, track. There wasn't a sport I didn't beg my parents to put me in.

I was four years old when I started swimming. And she's the daughter of... A former football player at Vanderbilt University who went on to play professionally in the NFL and who had multiple brothers who were also SEC athletes and NFL superstars. Brad Gaines is currently running for Congress, so I have to say something about this NFL superstar line.

This article, which is from the Philadelphia Inquirer's Sportscom, alumnist Phil Sheridan, to make room on the roster, the Eagles waved fullback Brad Gaines. He was in his first NFL camp at 28. Look, when I eventually write my autobiography, my memoirs, I too might turn my parents into superstar athletes. I do know that Riley Gaines herself, though, was like a seven-time state champion swimmer in high school, right?

Like, she was legit. This is a legitimate prospect. Yeah, she was good. She qualified for the Olympic trials at 15. There's a part of Chapter 1 of the book also where she talks about how she winds up at the University of Kentucky where a lot of her lore took place. And in 2016, she found herself with this decision to make.

It was time to choose a college where I could continue excelling in my athletic career. And what she describes is this very fond memory of being almost relentlessly recruited by the head swimming coach at the University of Kentucky who sold Riley Gaines at one point on attending a Kentucky basketball game. Don't judge.

This was when Kentucky men's basketball was actually good and not losing to St. Peter's Peacocks. Never in a million years did I think I'd actually fall in love with the school, which, of course, I did. And that annoying coach who kept calling and emailing me, he became and still is one of my best friends. The coach that became one of her best friends,

as she calls him, the relentless swimming coach that recruited her, what was his name? That coach was Lars Jorgensen. Riley calls him coach Lars, so we can call him that too. He was a former college swimmer. He made it to the Olympics in 1988. Came back, Coach D1 in Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee.

And by the time Riley got to Kentucky in 2018 in her freshman year, he'd been head coach of the Wildcats there for four years. And they were doing great under him. They were, by all accounts, on the rise. In the beginning of freshman year, he continually addressed me as a loft. I had no idea what this meant, and I never questioned it until one day I mustered up the courage to ask. I was told it means lack of effing talent. Ah, cool, thanks. We don't just have to take Riley's word for it, that this

was how Coach Lars operated. I talked to three of her former teammates at Kentucky, two of them who spoke on condition of anonymity because they know that Riley's fans and followers might go after people. But one of them agreed to go on the record. My name is Trinity Ward. I swam at University of Kentucky from 2019 to 2022. And also she was brave enough to speak to us on camera.

Trinity started at UK a year after Riley did. And by the time she's getting recruited at UK, She's seeing its intense training program. She's seeing all the resources that the school puts into the program. It was really pitched as and rightfully so, this program where, you know, you almost could have this rags to riches story of somebody that came in as a decent swimmer. And all of a sudden, after going through this training program, dropping, you know, 10 to 20 seconds sometimes. And really just improving a lot and becoming an all-star, making the All-American team.

becoming an SECA finalist, qualifying for NCAAs, meddling and finaling at NCAAs, which was really inspiring to me. But every person I'm talking to back home outside of swimming at my school was like, you're living the dream. You know, you're living like the fucking American dream. She became a specialist in the 100 meter butterfly, and this is what she trains for. And as she's really getting started, she says that, Coach Lars reminded her of the coach from Rocky.

Right. This is the guy who says, you're going to eat light and you're going to crap thunder. And you're going to crap thunder. Yeah, a shatalker. So now we're getting into 2020, and Riley Gaines again is on the team at the same time. She's a year older than Trinity Ward. And it sounds like things start escalating.

As Trinity started spending more time on this team, she said that the women's swim program revealed what she called some darker sides. There definitely were some darker size to that, like, you know, doing that pushing in an intense way that was not productive, like full on, you know, yelling at somebody where it was like, hey, like, now that. What Trinity and her two teammates all described to me was a culture set by Coach Lars at the top that went beyond talking, beyond mercurial. the way these three swimmers talked about it, and all of them were on the team at the same time as Riley Gaines, it was a place where they felt like their confidence was destroyed.

And like seeing someone cry or just become very upset or just say like, oh, I feel so worthless. But that's really tough to see. They talked about how if they didn't do well at a meet, they would be punished. They would have to do punishment swims. Like all the coaches left the pool deck, and we were told to just swim and don't stop for two hours.

All three of the teammates told me stories about how Coach Lars would try to force them to practice when they had real injuries or were seriously sick. Trinity says Lars didn't believe in days off. And on the swim team, this is pretty clear that a lot of these practices that were supposed to be voluntary under NCAA rules weren't. The NCAA actually suspended Jorgensen for three years for going over limits. on practice hours. The NCAA literally requires days off.

There are all these rules that are strict about practice hours in season versus the off season. But you're describing an ecosystem where there is a very powerful coach who is making them do things that they're actually not supposed to be doing. Yeah. And they would talk about depression being super common,

a lot of behavior that looked like disordered eating. They said that coach Lars pressured them or their teammates to lose extreme amounts of body fat down to 10 or 12%, which can be in the unhealthy range. They said that he would make fun of other teammates for being fat. And these are, let me remind you, D1 swimmers. It's like, okay, this person is one of the best swimmers on her team. And you're saying, you're making jokes about her being fat and not needing to eat cookies.

Like, I'm a worse swimmer than her, so that must mean that I need to lose weight to. The way that he talked about and treated weight was just not normal. And they had all of this sort of insecurity that they described based on what they were going through with Coach Lars on the team. And I'm not going to sit here and say that like, you know, Kentucky swimming is a source of like all my mental health problems and why I, you know, struggled with food in college and still sometimes due now to this day. But I know that if I hadn't been in that environment, I wouldn't have had a lot of the thoughts. or struggles that I did. I can't think of a single teammate I had where now I'm like, wow, that person was like really confident in themselves and their body.

They spoke about themselves very well. I just, I can't think of anyone. And that's where it's like, this is nuts. Which is to say that this is not the way that Riley Gaines characterized her swimming experience in swimming against the current. No, you wouldn't get any of this if you read Riley's memoir. She does call some of his comments, quote, utter savagery, end quote. But she says that this was for the purpose of motivating them,

that this was just his coaching style, and it was all to make them better. Lars's goal was to enforce a positive and healthy team culture, knowing that it would, in turn, bring athletic success. His mindset about winning wasn't solely focused on swimming. It wasn't just about being the top swimmers in the nation. It was about being women of great character and students who excel in the classroom as well. Riley didn't respond to my multiple requests for interviews, detailed questions about all this stuff. Her lawyer didn't respond to my questions either. And we're going to get to what the University of Kentucky had to say about this. But this program at the time, if you go through the

just the public records here, it's not just the story of like a hard-ass coach who's running things and being demanding of his players. It seems like there is a depth of the dysfunction that is also worth citing here. Yeah, this is a stack of papers from one of the investigations into the University of Kentucky swim team at this time, and it's a 2019 sexual harassment investigation

not into coach Lars, but into his assistant coach, Chip Klein. This investigation started after a bunch of swimmers had mentioned concerns about Klein in their exit interviews, so the university started looking into it and after going through their process

by what they call a preponderance of the evidence, which is basically, like, more likely than not. This is true. Klein had allegedly touched a swimmer's leg under her towel at a meet, forced that same swimmer to hug him before letting her enter the team room, made sexual comments about her and about other swimmers, things like comparing their bodies to meet, things like saying, quote, with a butt like that, she ought to be a good swimmer. And so what is the consequence of what this investigation finds? What does the school do? in response.

Yeah, so while it's investigating the school puts Klein on a suspension, that suspension stays in effect for the whole rest of the year, and then they declined to renew his contract at the end of the year. And at the same time, they also temporarily suspended Coach Lars himself for six days for failing to report what he knew about Klein's conduct. And so we should also say here that you requested comment from Chip Klein. And Chip Klein, the assistant in question, who worked for Lars Jorgensen, coach Lars, said, In part, quote, I choose not to respond to this request out of respect for what was supposed to be a confidential process, end quote.

And I do want to return, by the way, to coach Lars himself in just a bit here. But the question of, again, storytelling, why wasn't this stuff in Riley Gaines' book? It raises a question of that itself being a conspicuous choice now that you see it through this lens. Right. I mean, it would suggest that there might be more serious problems in women's sports. than trans people. The version of this story and the version of Riley Gaines, right, that continues to go viral online

to the point that she is this leading figure in the Trump-Maga Republican movement. How different is the person that these teammates see on television from the Riley Gaines that they swam with back in 2019, 2020? It's really clear that Riley has gone through a significant evolution.

Trinity, who was friends with her at the time, says that Riley in college was really different than her super Christian, super conservative public persona these days. And according to my 31-page timeline of Riley's life, this is 2021 after Trump left office. They took a two-hour drive together up to another teammate's family lakehouse. This is so funny looking back on. I drove a car of people and like Riley was in my front seat. We talked the two hours there and back.

and we both have conservative Christian upbringings. Like, kind of, like, talked about that and shared just about, like, dads that were definitely more, like, old school. And her making a comment just being like, yeah, like, I'm not, like, a diehard tromper. And that really, like, tracked with everything. I mean, to me, like, that made sense and tracked with what I had seen. Like, Riley was a very down-to-earth, very practical person. As a queer person that swam on that team, I never was like, wow, I feel like Riley's going to hate crying me today or like Riley makes me feel unsafe.

I am so grateful to see President Trump's quick and decisive action to uphold his campaign promise and protect female athletes. If you told me four years ago that Riley Gaines was going to be this spokesperson for the anti-trans movement, be speaking with Trump, I'd be like, what, you're crazy? like she doesn't even actually like him. And you know, when you hear that and even make allowances for the fact that all of us, I assume both of us were probably different in college than we are now, right? It does make me want to really understand like what the fuck happened.

The story here, like, it takes a turn. And where that takes us seems like it's worthy of, again, a return to your 31-page timeline about her life. Yeah, there's a story. definitely a transformation that happens at the time that Riley graduates. There is a radicalization that happens. And we see her become someone who's unrecognizable. So I take us back now to the part of your 31-page timeline of the life of Riley Gaines, where the origin story that she has sanctioned is about to take place. Because here is Riley Gaines and here is Coach Lars at this sporting event,

at the crux of American politics, the 2022 NCAA Women's Swimming Championships, which is not only the most controversial sporting event in America's recent history, it's also the one that I don't think people have ever actually seen. No chance. It's the final in a women's 500-yard freestyle. And you can see and feel the tension in this building.

Okay, so, We're in Atlanta. This is Georgia Tech's pool. It's March. Outside the facility, there are anti-trans protesters because the most notorious star in women's college swimming at the time is Leah Thomas. Transgender swimmer Leah Thomas breaking barriers and records. But in a new article, Sports Illustrated, calls the college senior the most controversial athlete in America. And tonight controversy continues to swirl around the University of Pennsylvania transgender swim. Leah Thomas, whose continued participation in and dominance of women's swimming prompted the NCAA to issue a rule change. Record-breaking transgender pen swimmer, Leah Thomas, will be allowed to compete in the Ivy League championships. Leah Thomas was a swimmer on the University of Pennsylvania men's team for three years. She transitioned during college, and then COVID came around.

She took a year off, and by the time she came back, she was eligible for the women's team. under NCAA policy, which at the time let trans women compete after being on testosterone suppressants for 12 months. But there was a problem once she came back and started competing on the women's team. She was winning. I do remember, you know, as we were training for NCAAs, people being like, oh my gosh, is she going to be there? Is she going to compete? One of the swimmers who I talked to agreed to go on tape on the condition that we modulate her voice. she was actually there at the NCAA 2022 championship.

And she says that the women on her team were obsessing over Thomas. Is she going to be in our locker room? I'm going to look at her when we're in our locker room. So was Riley part of this buzz? She was being such a bitch about the whole thing. But I just know that, like, her and Lars and some of the other coaches would just talk about, like, how disgusting it was and unfair. And it just couldn't believe it was happening. and they didn't want to be in the pool or around her

and all of this. Just kind of stuff like that. Leah Thomas pulling away over the final 150 meters. And so Leah's first race, by the way, was the 500-yard freestyle, which Riley Gaines was not competing in. You can actually just see Leah pulling away at the end to win this one.

Not dominant, but a victory. It wasn't our particularly fast time to win the 500 free. It was like a notably slow winning time for the 500 free in the past 10 years. So people were like acting insane

over this. Like she'd gone this jaw dropping Katie Ladecki rivaling time and that's just not what happened. It's the 200-yard freestyle final. But as for the race that did drop Jaws over time, the race that did

did launch the anti-trans athlete movement we've been talking about. That one was not the 500-yard freestyle. It was this. It was the 200-yard freestyle, which is where Leah Thomas and Riley Gaines are in the pool at the same time. And I just got to note that this is, in fact,

Riley Gaines' best event, the one that she's most comfortable swimming, and this time capsule that we're watching here, while it is remarkable from the large larger historical, sociological perspective. As a race, it's pretty uneventful. Taylor Ruck from Stanford is winning the whole time, wire to wire. Yeah, Taylor Ruck blows away the field, wins easily,

and coming in fifth place with the same exact time of one minute and 43.40 seconds, as you can see on the leaderboard right here, are Riley Gaines and Leah Thomas. We see her time come in and we're like, okay, like fifth, that's not what she wanted, but that's the highest she's ever placed at NCAA. She's going to be, she has to be happy. She added time, but that's the highest she's ever gotten. And then I remember looking over, and we were like, fuck, like, this isn't good.

And the thing that happens next is where you begin to glimpse the familiar version of the story that we know. On The Daily Wire, which is Ben Shapiro's website, they publish an interview with Riley Gaines. And the headline of this article, Madison, is what? I left there with no trophy. NCAA female swimmer who tied for fifth the trans athlete says officials put Leah Thomas ahead of her. Right. And so now you see the trophy. You see the focus on how the NCAA had an official that insisted that Leah Thomas get the fifth place trophy to hold on the podium, meaning that Riley Gaines had to hold the sixth place trophy,

which is not as, I guess, fifth placey in terms of what it felt like in her hand. She would get the fifth place trophy in the mail as a result. And this story keeps on getting printed and reprinted, and it's the media coverage that defined the debate. It is the story that doesn't die, Pablo. You know, in that first Daily Wire article, She says, I am in full support of her, in full support of her transition and her swimming career and everything like that.

Because there's no doubt that she works hard to, that she's just abiding by the rules that the NCAA put in place. I mean, what that is, is that's the Riley Gaines who gave her queer teammate a ride. That's her. That's the starting point for Riley Gaines here. And after the Daily Wire, naturally, in the sequence here, comes an interview on right-wing talk radio. with Clay Travis. We're talking to Riley Gaines, University of Kentucky, senior swimmer who competed against Leah Thomas, transgender swimmer at the NCAA championships.

Riley, what is the process like? And I believe I saw you comment on this in a daily wire article. Do you guys share dressing rooms? Do you share locker rooms with a biological male who identifies as a woman in advance of the competitions or after the competitions? Right. So the meet this last week was an all-female meet.

And so there wasn't even a male locker room opportunity because there are no males on deck. And so going into the meet, we were all curious what the situation would be. And so we were just told that we could all use that locker room, which is, you know, not a norm sharing locker rooms like that. And so it was a bit shocking that, you know, that was allowed. That's a whole different issue within itself. And so I would say we were all extremely surprised and, you know, uncomfortable with that because there are girls who that's not something they would agree to doing, you know, to consent to. And so it just seems like. So sorry to cut you off here, but I just want to.

You do see a roadmap there for what the framework of this event ends up becoming. Right. You get Clay Travis in a conversation about sexual assault and consent. I just want to build on this a little bit. So you have a biological man who is allowed to come into the locker room that you guys are in preparing to compete, getting ready to swim. And he is using the same locker room as you guys are. And if so, what is the reaction in the locker room? Because historically, if a man walks into a women's locker room, I mean, that's a crime.

And you can hear how Riley's tone starts to change a little bit. Right. I think the NCAA, you know, did make it seem like it was something that, oh, we'll just all share locker rooms. But, you know, there are so many girls who, you know, even face sexual assault. And this kind of thing can be traumatic on just so many different levels. No doubt. The whole like misgendering stuff, even aside, right? We're talking just about the narrative here, the storytelling contest here. And sexual assault coming up, which again, brings up this image, this temper. for how a trans athlete is not merely someone who's going to take your trophy from you,

take your scholarship from your kids, they're going to be predators, praying on your daughters. Right. And so just the encounter, by the way, just the sheer interaction in the locker room between Leah Thomas and Riley Gaines. I do want to fact check that. Yeah, so obviously I wasn't there. You weren't there. Leah Thomas declined an interview request, understandably. Riley didn't get back to me, but I did talk to not just the anonymous swimmer we heard from earlier, but also two other swimmers who competed at the NCAAs, two of whom say they changed with Leah there in the locker room.

And they were pretty eager to help me fact-check this. Riley's teammate, who will hear from now, refers to the locker room as the bathroom situation. NCAAs is only women's and that it's only men's. So they open up all of the bathrooms to the athletes. So there's no men's restroom. It's just this is the women's restroom. She says that in the locker room, Leo was just changing in a corner,

wrapped in a towel, keeping to herself. We're all very comfortable being naked. People don't usually cover themselves with towels to change or, like, go in bathroom stalls or anything like that. But any of the times I would see her in there, you know, she's like wrapped in her towel. She's turned around, not basing anyone. I felt bad for her.

I was like, she didn't ask. to be put in this environment with these people and treated this way. She just wanted to come and swim. That story is not the one that we hear on Fox News. And then Riley Gaines is on with none other than Tucker Carlson. I have such an amazing support system at the University of Kentucky, whether that be from the athletic director or all the way down to my head coach, Lars Jorgensen.

But just speaking for them, it's just totally wrong. And I know I can't speak for everyone, I am almost certain I'm speaking for a large majority of female athletes, that this is just not okay and it's not fair. There's the name check of Coach Lars as part of this amazing support system that she is describing. And really, really quickly, she starts getting involved in politics. She actually goes to the Kentucky state legislature

trying to get lawmakers to override the governor's veto of a trans sports ban, and they do within a month, within a month of swimming. against Leah Thomas. So it's just this immediate transition. And just a reminder here, we're in the middle of a midterm election year. And so now we're months removed from the NCAAs. And Riley Gaines gets put into campaign ads speaking for girls all across America. I train from an early age, giving it my all to achieve my dream. We see her in a campaign ad for Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul. But Rand Paul is not afraid to fight for fairness for women and girls. And that's why I'm

supporting him. This year in an ad for then Republican governor of South Dakota, Christy Noem. Christy Noem stood up for us, passing the toughest law in the country to defend female sports. It also happens to be, by the way, the now Secretary of Homeland Security in charge of ice. Mm-hmm. Here is Herschel Walker. But my senior year, I was forced to compete against a biological male. That's unfair in Rome.

A man won the swimming title that belonged to a woman, and Senator Warnock voted to let it happen. Why not's afraid to stand up for female athletes? Herschel Walker stands up for what's right. By the way, this ad came out after allegations of domestic violence from Herschel Walker's son. Then by the summer of 2022, I think this is when, like, a lot of America gets to see Riley Gaines for the first time. She's really breaking through when she gets called on stage at CPAC. This is the conservative political action conference at which, none other than Donald's, Trump personally summons onto the stage, quote,

Where's our beautiful, great swimmer? Gaines, where's Gaines? Look at, come up here. Will you please come up here? Come up, come up, come up. This is a great champion. And she was beating everybody, and then one day she looked over and said, that's the largest human being I've ever seen. Riley Gaines' timing is really good. Like, she is coming in after 14 states have already passed these

trans sports bands. Like this isn't a brand new cause. This has already been a cause that Republican politicians have been pushing in the states for a couple of years now. It's been catching on. It's been working. But as you know, Pablo, like the problem that they have is that they just don't have a lot of trans athletes to point to. There are very, very few of them. So how do you see that this is a real problem? It's extremely convenient to go point at somebody like Riley Gaines who can say, hi, I was a victim of this, who can go sit in the Kentucky legislature and say, look, there is a real victim of these policies. And that's, I think, why her story breaks through. Yeah, there's aren't enough examples of female athletes, period, who are losing to trans athletes

because there aren't that many trans athletes in general. And so you get Riley Gaines testifying, not just at the Virginia State Legislature, but at the Kansas State Legislature and the North Carolina state legislature, all for these anti-trans bills that are being, again, put in front of these voting bodies. The NCAA forced female swimmers to share a locker room with Thomas, a six-foot-four, 22-year-old male equipped with an exposing male genitalia and a room full of vulnerable, undressed women. And in each one of those cases, what you see is that it's not just the Leah Thomas story.

From 18 to 22-year-old girls who were exposed to male body parts. She, this single data point, Riley Gaines, is now this avatar for all girls everywhere. Our experiences is Z1 Summers. It's not unique. To are in danger of quote unquote men, these predators in women's sports. And she goes on the road. She continues to go on the road. I mean, she's giving speeches at college campuses. I mean, it's not unlike Charlie Kirk. The events that she does on college campuses, some of them are actually sponsored by Turning Point USA,

the conservative youth organization, founded by Charlie Kirk, and they popularized the model of sending right-wing provocateurs to go speak on college campuses and then making a lot of content out of it and really trying to make political hay when students come out to protest. In 2023, with the one-year anniversary of the NCAA Championships approaching now, that relatively boring race that we watched on ESPN earlier in the episode, Riley Gaines goes on the podcast of the late Charlie Kirk himself. The NCAA allowed us as female athletes to, not even just allowed,

they encourage us as female athletes to participate in Leah Thomas' sexual arousment and Leah Thomas's fetish. You can hear in this Charlie Kirk podcast at this time just how much it's been dialed up, the extremism and the outward transphobia. And again, I blame the decline of American men. This never should have been, you know, you should have, someone should have just took care of it, the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or 60s.

Yeah, I mean, look, Thomas should be institutionalized and should be given some help, obviously. You should not be exposing yourself to other women. You're a freak, you're a voyeur. It should be illegal. And by the way. And it goes on, obviously, but you can see already. Like, this is, I mean, this is, it's just, I would say it's profoundly fucked up, right?

Like, the way in which you're now alleging criminality, not like sports disadvantage, but like actual criminality here from these athletes who are trying to compete. We have fully turned the corner here from this is about fairness in women's sports to actually starting to allege that this is a kind of sexual assault. this is some of the most extreme, perverse anti-trans talking points that you're going to find anywhere on the internet. And it's moving from Charlie Kirk's podcast to around the same time an appearance on Fox News. We did not give our consent. They did not ask for our consent. But in that locker room, we turned around. And there's a six-floor biological man dropping his pants and watching us undress.

And we're exposed to male genitalia. And so that to me was worse than the competition. competition piece. Not even probably a year or two years ago. This would have been considered some form of sexual assault. And that rhetoric there, like the actual equating of being a trans athlete competing and changing in a locker room to some form of sexual assault, to quote Riley Gaines just then. This is how we get to June of this year, where there's this other wildly viral story because Riley Gaines decides to post who are now more than 1.6 million. followers on X, the video of Simone Biles testifying to Congress about the horror of being abused by USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nasser.

I don't want another young gymnast, Olympic athlete, or any individual to experience the horror that I and hundreds of others have endured before, during, and continuing to this day in the wake of the Larry Nasser abuse. And what Riley Gaines posts here in this split screen side-by-side thing that she does on this tweet, where on the left it's the video of Simone Biles, and on the right it's a screenshot of a tweet by Simone Biles that called Riley Gaines a bully. I mean, it's just hard to evade the extreme nature of the argument that she's now officially making. Yeah, and Simone Biles was tweeting this in response.

to Riley misgendering a high school softball player. Riley's caption on that tweet was, quote, Simone Biles when she had to injure a predatory man versus Simone Biles when other girls have to injure predatory men, end quote. So when Riley Gaines is saying predatory men in this tweet, she's putting trans women and women's sports on the same spectrum as Larry Nassar. Like that's what she's doing here. And not only is she saying that they're men, she's saying that if they participate in women's sports, that's a kind of abuse. The equivalent she's making there is that Larry Nassar, again, responsible for the sexual assault and predation of more than a hundred athletes. That is very similar to what Riley Gaines experienced when she lost to a trans athlete and tied for fifth at the NCAA swimming championships.

And after all of this, it's Simone Biles, who actually apologizes. She had gone and said earlier that Riley Gaines' body was like a man's, which I think everyone would say that crossed a line. but there was no apology from Riley after making this comparison. In fact, she doubled down. And to be clear, she has access now to every rung of the media ladder. Yeah, to recap, The Daily Wire, Clay Travis, Charlie Kirk, Fox News all day, every day. And I regret to inform you that Riley Gaines, like you, is also a podcaster. I was worried that that connection was also going to be made.

So Riley Gaines, like me, is in fact a podcaster, but she is also not just that. She is working for Fox News as a frequent contributor. She's a political figure. She's a speaker on college campuses that Turning Point USA formerly hired as a contributor last year. The same year, by the way, 2024, where she became the vice chair, Madison, of something called the Athletes for America Coalition at the America First Policy Institute. This resume, this ever-expanding resume, how enriching. is it? Okay, so six months ago when you sent me down this rabbit hole, this is absolutely what I wanted to find out. Like, how much money is Riley Gaines actually making? So I hear that on this

podcast you like tax forms. I have plenty of them. That is my deviance. My deviance, my fetish is tax forms. I'm so sorry. So the Federal Election Commission, this is actually a disclosure from the FEC. I think you might have copies there too. Yes, yes, I do. And what you wind up seeing in these documents is that over the last three years, from 2023 to 2025, speaker fees for Riley Gaines, as paid out by various state and local Republican committees, have more than octopled. So in 2023, we have Riley Gaines making $3,000 at an appearance in Kentucky in 2024.

We're seeing a 13,929. fee from the Republican Central Committee in Nevada. And then on page 45 of a filing from Harris County Republicans in Texas, this past June, $25,000. Again, more than eight times bigger than two years earlier, tracking right alongside the sharpening and perfecting of this whole trans-inclusion as sexual assault argument. from Riley Gaines in dozens upon dozens and dozens of appearances all over Fox News. Riley Gaines joins us now. Riley Gaines joins us right now with reaction. Riley Gaines, she's America's number one feminist as far as I'm concerned.

An ambassador at the Independent Women's Forum, Riley Gaines. Riley, good morning. Thanks for being here. Riley Gaines is with us. Riley, how are you? But that's not all, by the way, because Riley Gaines also got a job. as a spokesperson at the Independent Women's Forum in 2022, which helped her get directly involved in politics. Riley Gaines has now testified or appeared with politicians

in at least 21 states by our count so far. I feel frustrated, I feel betrayed, I feel heartbroken, I feel demoralized, that we have to be here. And on top of that, there was the grand opening in 2023 now of the Riley Gaines Center, a center which was founded at something called the Leadership Institute, which turns out to be a conservative nonprofit

that has been recruiting and training right-wing activists for like 50 years. The mission of the Riley Gaines Center was very specific. It was to recruit other student athletes who had been, quote, harmed by zealots of transgender ideology.

Part of her job, working for the Leadership Institute here is to go give out actual medals, Pablo. Literal medals with the Leadership Institute logo on them to other girls and women who reject trans women in sports.

Many mees of Riley Gaines essentially. And according to their tax forms, Riley Gaines, director of the Riley Gaines Center, pocketed $126,523 within just five months. of her center's founding, raising this larger question of who exactly was funding this center

named after a 23-year-old. So they're a nonprofit. They don't have to disclose their donors publicly. But by going and pulling tax forms for other powerful conservative foundations, I was able to find one of these funders. And this one is the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation. Betsy DeVos, of course, Donald Trump's first term education secretary, who was also part of a very well-connected family.

Yeah, some of the most powerful funders, some of the biggest funders in Republican politics. We should say the sister of former Blackwater founder, Eric Prince. You know, her name is DeVos because she married into the family that co-founded the Health and Beauty Empire, Amway. which is also why I can very safely declare that the family that owns the Orlando magic are also the DeVos's

and also some of the many dollars behind the Riley Gaines Center. And you can see on their text form, Leadership Institute, $100,000 in 2023. The main character, the star of the anti-transathlete movement, this avatar for the, mega-Republican effort, you're saying that that person Riley Gaines happens to be funded by billionaire NBA owners. The Riley Gaines Center definitely was. And so as we put these tax forms right alongside her appearances on Fox News, it is important to remind ourselves that this shit worked. Beyond even the

whole like Simone Biles thing, which was abhorrent in terms of its false equivalence, I just remember the effectiveness, the normalization of this whole conversation. Like, there were the campaign ads, Madison, that I'm sure you remember in the middle of Major League Baseball Playoff games that apparently helped turn the election in which they declared very proudly. Kamala's agenda is they them, not you. I'm Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message. Kamala is for they, them.

President Trump is for you. There is polling saying that these ads did. shift voters. And the NCAA, meanwhile, they did also ban trans women from women's sports. This happened the day after Donald Trump signed that executive order in front of Riley Gaines wearing all white at the White House in the video we started this episode with. Where he says, Trump has said, it's a big reason that he won back the White House, and then he credited Riley. And by the way, just to keep up the accounting here, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee effectively did the same thing this summer because of Donald Trump riding this wave of popular momentum,

all of which is to say that as Coach Lars saw potential in Riley Gaines, right, motivating her by claiming that she had a lack of talent, she proved that she was a prospect worth investing in. She has remade American public policy in her image. The movement that she is the face of works because her story, her storytelling, is believed by so many parents and Americans who see this story through her eyes. We've got the NCAA ban. We've got the Olympic ban. We've got these kinds of policy changes that, you know, and this is a key point, could actually maybe be undone in the future pretty easily. You know, if we get a new president, maybe there's a new executive order. Maybe the U.S. Olympic Paralympic Committee changes its mind.

And so the conundrum for Riley Gaines right now is how do we make these policy changes, these transports bans permanent, or at least more permanent than Trump? How do you make them apply nationwide so that no trans girl, K-12, college, in Blue States, New York, California, none of them can play on a girls team. And how do you do that permanently? Use the courts. A new lawsuit could have a big impact on who can and who can't convince. in college sports. Riley Gaines and 15 other female athletes just filed a lawsuit against the

NCAA. She says this development was due time and that the NCAA has been served. Gaines v. NCAA. This big lawsuit that's now winding its way through the court system, who is behind that? Who's funding that one? I'm so sorry to say that it is time to listen to Riley Gaines's podcast. Today's guest is Bill Bock. He was an NCAA official. His story is pretty incredible. Because in this episode, Riley Gaines introduces us to someone who has been dodging my calls, her lawyer. He's actually an experienced litigator. He has substantial experience with sports law in sports during drug testing. He was actually the General Counsel of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency for 13 years. He's represented

clients in high-profile investigations and litigation, including Lance Armstrong. And after those 13 years at the U.S. anti-doping agency, actually not representing Lance Armstrong, taking down Lance Armstrong, this lawyer, Bill Bach left his job in 2020 and got a new client, Donald Trump. Of course. This is when Trump was denying the results of the 2020 election. I believe I remember Bill Bach, who also worked for the NCAA itself. He was on this committee that handed down punishment.

to schools that break like NCAA rules and stuff, before quitting in protest, because he wrote a giant op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he accused the NCAA of, quote, regressive discriminatory anti-woman policies, end quote. And it seems like the origin story for his position there in the pages of the Wall Street Journal

was that Riley Gaines happened to tie Leah Thomas for fifth place in Atlanta at the NCAA championships. The swimming race that started at all. And now he's working for her. Now she is his client. And, P.S., he's not critiquing how the NCAA treats female athletes in other contexts. This is all about trans people.

The NCAA has imposed a radical anti-woman agenda on college sports. Redefined women as a testosterone level. permitted men to compete on women's teams, destroyed female safe spaces in women's locker rooms by authorizing naked men possessing full male genitalia to disrobe in front of non-consenting college women. And so as we continue to examine the grift that keeps on giving, Bill Box legal argument here and Gaines v NCAA,

which is filed in 2024. It does have to do with Title IX. This is the law from the 1970s that banned sex discrimination in American schools. Quote, no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of,

or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance, end quote. Riley Gaines is the lead plaintiff in this lawsuit, but Bill Bach also filed on behalf of 15 more female athletes who all have complaints about trans people. And they say that letting Leah Thomas swim, but also letting any other trans athlete compete in the women's division violates Title IX. Right. The way to get there is legally portray Riley Gaines as his victim and provide a roadmap for the permanent extinction of trans women, trans girls, in K through 12, all the way up to

college in terms of their ability to participate in sports. And I just have to imagine. Imagine here, hiring the guy who represented Donald Trump himself, like, that cannot be cheap. No, I have a tab in my spreadsheet also called Contributions to Icons, and this gets us to yet another nonprofit in the anti-trans movement. So Icons is an acronym for the Independent Council on Women's Sports. And at the New York Times last year, they called it the, quote, preeminent organization in the trans sports ban movement, end quote. This nonprofit started with press conferences, but it pretty quickly pivoted to focusing on the legal arena.

It exists pretty much exclusively to fund lawsuits in the name of Riley Gaines and Company. It's got a handful of them all pending in court, all making pretty much the same argument. And Icons is pretty interesting, too. It was started by a former champion college swimmer at the University of Arizona, and a swim mom, herself, a former tennis player at Stanford,

who got fired up about these issues because, can you guess? I have to imagine a certain swim meet in Atlanta, Georgia. The matchup heard around the world. So the daughter of the swim mom, one of these icons co-founders, she had actually lost Talia Thomas a couple times that season. So they had gone head-to-head. They had encountered each other at competitions. And so if we look at these tax forms here, what we can see, this is the 2022 tax form 990 for the Independent Council on Women's Sports.

This one says that icons went from a $100,000 organization in 2022 to we have this one here from 2024, a million dollar organization. Like 10 times bigger than it used to be in the span of two years feels appropriate for what we've been discussing this whole time. How many other organizations like this are in this like nesting doll of like money sources? There are so many of these groups. Icons has really broken through. And I think that that's because they are not just a rebranding of the same Heritage Foundation, you know, conservative DC think tank. They're not a creature of that world so much as they are in outgrowth of people who are involved in women's sports who care deeply about it and who have gone through that process, that gateway drug, and landed on, you know, this increasingly radicalized side of the transgender athlete debate. And it's not just the Alliance Defending Freedom, like classic players of the conservative social movement or.

over the last 30 years in America. I know. I missed the Cato Institute. Those were the days. Those were the days. Instead, the donor to icons that apparently we know about is what? So XXXY Athletics is a brand, a clothing brand. I've been working with XXXY since they started,

but it is surreal to now collaborate with them. I have my own line, if you will, with them called the Be Bold Collection. Expects some red, white, and blue. For the 4th of July, how we feel about the greatest nation in the world. And, of course, proclaiming the message that women's sports are only for women.

Is it sick that I might actually wear something like this if it was a different context? I was going to say, if you were in the market for a t-shirt that had the text of title nine that we read before, emblazoned across the back, we have one candidate for your money. This whole brand, if you couldn't tell from the ad, is built on...

arguing in this sort of glossy marketing language that trans women are men and that they don't belong in women's sports. It's the whole schick. They have a lawsuit out there, a whole other one, saying that we have the right to misgender people. This is what this whole brand is built on. And they funnel their money to icons for some of their merch. I mean, they're all like these pretty creative instruments to funnel money to towards, it turns out, this lawsuit, as well as the other similar lawsuits that Bill Bach seems to be filing. And so how is all that going? Riley Gaines' lawsuit just had a court decision. The court threw out a lot of it, but it did

preserve some of the claims against the NCAA, including the Title IX claim. But then at some point early next year, we have another couple of court cases that are going to be all over the news that we know about. And this is because the Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases involving trans athletes, these ones starting from back in 2020 and 2021 at the very beginning of this movement. And the lawsuits are arguing that Title IX and the Constitution as a related concern, they actually prohibit banning trans athletes. And these athletes in this case, there's a cross-country runner, a middle schooler in West Virginia. There's a college student in Idaho also a cross-country runner. So it's the other way. Riley Gaines is arguing Title IX requires banning trans athletes.

These cases argue the opposite spin. Right. Does Title IX require trans women to be banned from women's sports, or does it prohibit you from passing those bans because that's a kind of sex discrimination? We're going to get an answer to the question of whether these bans are forbidden, presumably next year when the Supreme Court decides these cases, probably by next summer. And, you know, P.S., down in the lower courts, the circuit courts, they ruled in favor of the trans athletes. So we're going to find out if the Supreme Court agrees. And if they do, that could invalidate all of those state laws that Riley Gaines helped pass banning trans women from women's sports. And so I just think of what Riley Gaines told the New York Times this summer in yet another interview that she gave.

And she said, quote, the gender ideology movement is a house of cards, and I believe it's lying on the sports issue. This will be the card that makes all of it crumble. What she's saying is that sports, the fight over sports, is the key to getting anti-trans policies passed on all of these levels, getting court wins for her and for her allies that are going to have ramifications for trans people's rights. And if Title IX doesn't protect trans people from discriminations,

from discrimination and education that has like implications for bathrooms, it has implications for school clubs, all sorts of issues around trans kids being able to go to school as themselves. And so now we're just seeing the logic and the incentive structure become clear, which is to say that when it comes to why Riley Gaines might have been telling this story in this way, changing it over time, apparently exaggerating the story of how Leah Thomas inside that fateful bathroom slash locker room had exposed her to male genitalia, allegedly,

but she then went on to equate to, quote, some form of sexual assault. The reason that all of that matters, the fact-checking of that, is because it provides the framework for keeping trans people out of not just sports, but pretty much every space in American life. There's a whole other lawsuit that we haven't talked about yet.

At this point, I feel like I'm the person that needs to go for a swim. So we've now traced the arc from Riley Gaines growing up, being recruited by Coach Lars, to making it to the University of Kentucky, to then feeding into the right-wing outrage machine that has completely dominated the American political moment. And there is something else that we haven't even gotten to yet that is relevant to every part of the story. So Riley's lawsuit and the other lawsuits over trans athletes, those make a lot of headlines, but there's another case that we haven't talked about. And this brings us back to coach Lars Jorgensen.

He was the one who, according to Riley's teammates, imposed punishment swims, ran them ragged. The thing is, it's not just them who have raised these kinds of complaints about Lars Jorgensen. In 2023, the year after Riley graduated, other swimmers at the... University of Kentucky started complaining about Jorgensen to the athletic department, and they opened an investigation into whether Coach Lars was complying with NCAA rules. So I got records from that investigation from the university through a public records request. 29 swimmers and seven coaches were interviewed, plus alumni rode in, and they back up pretty much everything that my sources said about Jorgensen from the punishment swims to the eating disorders. When I reached out to the

University of Kentucky for comment. They tell me that Jurgensen was removed from the pool deck on May 1st of 2023 in the midst of this investigation. He was prohibited from interacting with student athletes and coaches. And so Coach Lars, who again was one of Riley's best friends, even post-graduation. Was she involved in any of this? At this point, she is deep into her own transformation, deep into the never-ending news cycle. And so on the day that the news breaks on the swimming, World Insider website Swim Swam, that this investigation was going on and Jorgensen had been put and leave. Riley was actually testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee. She's bringing up the usual talking points about how having men and women's sports is a violation of women's safety,

all that now familiar stuff. That having men and women's sports is wrong and that it's unfair and it's a violation to, again, our privacy and rights to safety as women. And a week after we learn about this investigation on Swim Swam, Jorgon's. and resigns. The University of Kentucky tells me they negotiated a settlement for a fraction of his contract value in exchange for him cooperating with their inquiry. And meanwhile, back on Swim Swam in the comment section, which is pretty lively, as I've learned. I've heard of Swim Swam before. It is the place for argument commentary, and it turns out tips in a larger investigation. The stories about Jorgensen were not just about

running swimmers ragged and the kinds of eating disorder pressures that we see throughout women's sports, it got even darker. And so we find out exactly how much darker in April 2024. And that's when two people on the swim team, both of them, former members of the team, who Jorgensen had then hired as assistant coaches, they filed another lawsuit, alleging that Jurgensen's actually assaulted them. one of the swimmers who files this lawsuit, she alleges that Jorgensen forcibly raped her multiple times between 2019 and 2023,

which includes Riley's time on the team. And it says that he would tell the alleged victim he would ruin her reputation if she told anyone. The other one says that in 2022, he groped and kissed her without consent. And their complaint also alleges that he raped a third assistant coach at his home after a Christmas party several years earlier. Lars Jorgensen did not respond to questions that I sent him. His lawyers didn't either. In court papers, he said that the sexual assault claims are not true.

What did the university itself have to say? Yeah, they said that they were not aware of the most serious allegations until this lawsuit was filed. That's a quote. And they continued and said, UK has consistently acted upon and investigated allegations when they were known and when complainants have opted to pursue allegations and participate in the investigative process, end quote.

And they're saying this because the swimmers who filed the lawsuit say that the university had discouraged them from reporting their claims. Right. And the university also is saying, quote, this has prompted an important conversation by what more we can do to ensure the health, safety, and well-being of all community members, end quote. And they then go on to list a series of reforms across campus.

But the big question, that we have worked our way around to from where we started and that climb up through conservative politics and the top of America itself all the way to this lawsuit here, which as described is horrific, is what do we prioritize

and who are we protecting when it comes to the question of what women's sports should be concerned about? it's a shifting of the perspective from what you're hearing on Fox News. One of the assistant coaches who filed the lawsuit against Lars Jorgensen has since transitioned, female to male. And the lawsuit uses she-her pronouns to talk about the time period around the alleged assaults, which is why we're doing that too.

But when the case was first filed, Jorgensen's lawyer at the time brought Riley into it. He said that the allegations had been fabricated to, punish coach Lars for supporting Riley Gaines. And that lawyer, Greg Anderson, told the Lexington Herald leader, quote, this all has to do with NCAA woke philosophy. I mean, look, the question of are there men who should be considered predators around women's sports? We've mentioned a couple of them earlier. Larry Nassar being one famous example.

Yeah, these are like fairly common. And unfortunately common types of allegations. And, you know, according to the U.S. Center for SafeS. Sport, which is the organization created by Congress as a nonprofit to investigate these types of allegations, coaches are the most common perpetrators of sexual contact also. And, p.S., the U.S. Center for Safe Sport has been investigating the same case, some of these same allegations. And in early October, they ruled that Lars Jurgensen, was banned from coaching for life.

And I just cannot help but remember that this is the coach that Riley Gaines called one of her best friends. One of my best friends. In her bestselling memoir that came out in May of 2024. And look, I get that this book was probably on the way back from the printer by then because the lawsuit, you know, this was all filed in April of 2024. And I want to just be realistic about publishing timelines and all of that. But when we come to this question of who are the men we are concerned about in sports,

who have been abusive, allegedly, and predatory allegedly, in these spaces that we should be worried about when it comes to our daughters, our girls, our female athletes, what has Riley Gaines said about Coach Lars and these allegations? I found one tweet from a few days after the allegations became public. And it reads, in part, quote, I took the weekend to spend time with current and former University of Kentucky teammates. The general consensus is that we are disgusted, heartbroken, and ashamed to be affiliated with a program where anything like this could have been alleged to have happened. Lars was someone I trusted, loved, and respected. I would have gone to bat for him and defended him until the end.

I feel entirely blindsided and betrayed. She goes on to write, regardless of the allegations, my stance is clear. Sexual predators should not be able to obtain or maintain a position of authority over anyone, much less a team of vulnerable, half-naked young women. End quote. And I just can't help but just see her stance

that she's alluding to there as her larger stance, as if the two things that we've now covered here, the experience she had with Leah Thomas and the revelations she says she has now learned in the spring of 2024 about one of her best friends, coach Lars, who is now this alleged sexual predator, that this all can fit together quite neatly. And it's all been consistent this whole time, even though when it comes to the number of words she's devoted to one versus the other, that actually is a race that's not even close. I have to say she's, I mean, she's a 25-year-old.

She has this incredible public platform, but this is a lot for anyone to deal with when you have allegations against somebody close to you. At the same time, she has just been churning out all of this material, all of this content, all of this outrage about sexual abusers in sports, in her framing of it, transgender women.

That's the spectrum that she puts it on. So she has this platform. She has plenty to say on this kind of topic, but one tweet. What has she said about Coach Lars since then? I mean, just two months ago on another podcast, she referred to him as a fantastic coach. There's been really very, very little. And I just felt this almost like this emptiness,

Right? There wasn't a lot of satisfaction in doing what I did. I had great friends at a fantastic coach. And then we're in the Simone Biles news cycle, which happened after these revelations came out. And by the way, it's really hard to overlook the fact that in all of those podcasts, those multiple Fox News appearances, where she was comparing Larry Nassar's sexual abuse to her experience in the locker room with Leah Thomas, she's very clear, it seems, that, quote, what me and my teammates have, had to go through in terms of the trans athlete competition question was certainly sexual abuse. And to me, that is sexual abuse. What me and my teammates had to go through was certainly sexual abuse. That was on Stephen A. Smith's podcast. And look, I do want to say, the voice that you should

be listening to on how this all feels to hold these ideas simultaneously is not my. mine, it's not Stephen A's, and it's not yours, Madison. Right. It does seem like this is why, in fact, you made sure to talk to her actual teammates. Yeah, Trinity Ward, if you'll remember the teammate who went on the record with us. She had been so thrilled to be a part of the University of Kentucky's swim program. But then Coach Lars changed her view of that, and she has so little respect for what Riley has spent her time doing since graduation.

I don't think that what Riley Gaines does deserves to be called advocacy. When we think of advocacy, we think of people that are campaigning, fighting for a better future. And normally the word that comes to mind when you think of advocacy is inclusion, not exclusion. If you told most people, all you have to do is make hateful statements on the internet. internet, post some ad brands, and you're going to have half the country of worshipping you and panging up your picture on their daughter's wall saying you're an American hero and you're going to never work a real job the rest of your life? I mean, most people, that's their dream. Like, that is the easy way, in some ways, like really the easy way out. I can't think of

anything else besides money and fame that would cause the dramatic transformation in Riley that I've seen because like I said, I never would have thought that this would happen. And I thought very highly of her before. And so at the end here, when it comes to this question of like, how do you tell the story then of Riley Gaines in this context and this movement in this context and these allegations in this full context, is there a summary that you can provide us that we can take with us just to remember, like, what's actually the real story here? I think Trinity Ward deserves the last word here. When I wear my UK swimming gear, I've had three times where somebody's approached me and

asked me about Riley Gaines. And I've said, well, do you know about Lars Jorgensen? And the answer is always no. And she says, quote, it's hard for me to care about Riley Gaines tying for fifth when my swim coach is accused of raping my teammates. And people shut up pretty quickly. after that. Yeah.

Madison Pauley, thank you so much for finally helping us tell this story. Glad to do it. This has been Pablo Torre finds out a metal arc media

production. And I'll talk to you next time.