PHLY Philadelphia Eagles Podcast - Bonus episode: "Locker Room Talk" & women in sports media, with Melissa Ludtke & Olivia Reiner

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

In a break from our usual focus, Melissa Ludtke joins the show to discuss her book "Locker Room Talk: A Woman's Struggle To Get Inside," her landmark case that won equal rights for female reporters and how she has seen the shape of women in sports media change over the years. Olivia Reiner, who covers the Eagles for the Philadelphia Inquirer, joins the discussion as the echoes of Ludtke's fight in 1977 are still reverberating today. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to a little something different here on our PHOI channel. I'm Bo Wolf, joined today by Melissa Ludke and Olivia Reiner. We're going to sort of talk about your book, Melissa, locker room talk, a woman's struggle to get inside. I think a wonderful melding of like a memoir, a locker, a legal drama, history, all these things, and a lot of things about sports journalism. larger topics that echo today. And so, Olivia, you've been kind enough to join us as well. Thank you for joining us.

I'm thrilled to be here, you know, and we may be walking up right now, possibly. Don't want to say I'm a pronosticator, but it looks like it could be the Yankees and the Dodgers. Yeah, I know. What a boost that would be. I know the Mets fans out there are not going to be happy with that, but I did watch the game last night. I think the Phillies fans will be happy for the Mets to lose. Yankees and the Dodgers, we are back to my era, 77, 78, and to the World Series where my locker room case began in 77, Yankees and Dodgers, the Yankees Stadium.

So, you know, it's down memory lane. Yeah, let's get into it. Okay. Because for the people who are unfamiliar, it all starts in that World Series. Yes, it does. You have been covering the Yankees as, you know, as a Sports Illustrated reporter. you've been eventually allowed into the locker room. You go to the Dodgers and see what they think about letting you into the locker room.

They are okay with it. You're watching game one and all of a sudden what happens? All of a sudden, I'm sitting in the auxiliary press box. We had four people from Sports Illustrated. I mean, the World Series is a big deal. We had four people and our main writer was up in the main press box. And the other three of us were in the auxiliary press box with a little squeaky loudspeaker that would tell us the scoring thing.

usually, you know, it just ruled an error or rolled ahead. And I wasn't expecting to hear my name over it or anyone's name, frankly. And so they always repeated things. So the first time it came over, I sort of like, I actually turned to Roger Angel, who was sitting next to me from the New Yorker. I said, Roger, was that my name? He said, I think so. Let's listen. And so we sort of listened again when they repeated it. And they said, yeah, I had to report to the main press box. You know, the interesting thing is, my memory is that I didn't think at the time that it was because of any of the arrangements that I had worked so hard to build the relationships and the arrangements I'd made before the game and the past I had around me said I had access to the clubhouse. I didn't know. I really didn't. I honestly didn't. So I walk up there and I get up to the main press box and it is in a series of conversations I have with all but the commissioner of baseball who I have. asked to speak to him, was told I couldn't, and in fact, I never did.

That when the message was delivered, it didn't matter that the Yankees given me permission, did not matter that the Dodgers had given me permission. It did not matter that the baseball writers had given me permission. There was one being on earth who could give me permission. His name was Bowie Cune, and because he was commissioner, he held absolute authority, which could not be questioned. And he had delivered the message to me that as long as he was commissioner, first of all, I would be in no clubhouse during this World Series. And I would be in no clubhouse forever, it was said, which meant the tenure of his commissionership.

He was only 50 years old. So this wasn't looking promising. So that's what happened October 11th of 1977 at the 1977 World Series. And so from there, what happens between then and what becomes a national story and sort of a groundbreaking legal case? Well, what happens is that we try to negotiate with the commissioner. But as someone who went to Princeton University and then to the University of Virginia Law School, and it practiced law for a good couple, you know, maybe 15, 16 years at a white shoe law firm, for him not to recognize the Brown versus Board of Education decision in 1954 that separate was not equal. Somehow he didn't. He was reluctant to go in that direction. We realized after a while we were just circling the wagons and we weren't going to make progress. It was at that point that the company reached out to their outside counsel, as they did for any cases, they were considering taking to court.

and they reached out to Gravath, Swain, and Moore into an attorney by the name of Frederick August Otto Schwartz, Jr., F-A-O-Schwarz Jr., for all you toy store officinados. And Fritz was assigned to my case, developed a Fritz Schwartz. The sports department being the toy store. Being the toy store. There you come. Oh, I love that. I hadn't thought of that, but I'm going to steal it now. There you go.

So Fritz became my attorney and began to develop what would become the complaint that would be filed on December 29th to the Southern District Court of Manhattan. And at that point, they would select the judge who would oversee the case by a random lottery. And go ahead. I had a quick question. So how old were you at this point? Well, it was 24 when I was assigned to be the reporter researcher on Major League Baseball. and when this happened to me, I was 26. So where, as I can only, I can't imagine truly, like, what it would be like to be 26 years old in your shoes.

Where did you find the courage and the strength to go through with all of this? You know, people ask me that. And when we get a little further down the road and we're talking about the strength, particularly after the case was filed, because that's when it was most important. Because the things that were said about me in print, although not close to what's set about women in social media today stung. It wasn't me that they were writing about. It was some other person. And that really, that really, they degraded, they demeaned me, they sexualized me, they turned me into a sexual object in order to say that I was the invading force and that by being

there I would disrupt the men's lives and I would embarrass the male players. So this wasn't me. It mean, when I said yes to having my name as the plaintiff, it was all about loving the job I did. Sure. I had this job. How did I ever get it? But I had it, and I loved it. And I just wanted to keep doing it. And I wanted to do it fully.

I wanted to be able to show people at my magazine that I had earned the stripes to be able to do this. By then, I'd written baseball stories for them. You know, I'd been up there. I knew the Yankees team better than probably anyone at the magazine. because arguably I've been around there more. Here I had the opportunity to report my first world series, and it was taken away. It was a terribly deflating moment.

But it wasn't until afterwards when the press coverage came at me. What sustained me, the letters that came from girls and women. They only would send them, they'd say, Melissa Lutkey, Sports Illustrated in New York, and they'd arrive on my desk. And what thrills me to this day is when I went back into the boxes that were kept by my attorneys, five huge boxes of all these documents that I lived with in order to tell this story. I found that I actually replied, I wrote letters back. We corresponded because I can see the

letters in return to mine. One of those letters came from a girl who was 15 years old. She had just written a letter to the Yankees to want to be a bat girl. And she talked about how they'd written her and said, no, it's inappropriate for you to want to do this, and said no. And she had gone to the Human Rights Commission and to the city of New York, and she'd gotten people to back her. So those were the letters that sustained me, because it was at that point I realized this was bigger than me. What I was feeling, you know, the hurt that I felt personally was no longer the issue. The issue had grown bigger than me, and I don't want to sound egoist in that,

but it was a recognition of the responsibility. I, at that point, bore as being the named plaintiff, you know, in this lawsuit and in equal rights fight, which was very much what was happening in that era in the 70s. You know, that was the era when women had to get their rights, had to break down the barriers, and had to go to court to do it. So I just felt suddenly that I was a part of something bigger than myself. And so myself didn't matter that much. if that makes sense.

Oh, absolutely. Well, I mean, you are very much a pioneer, and were you able to, because it absolutely comes through in the book, like the question is, how did you have the strength at this age to deal with all that stuff? Were you able to sort of disassociate yourself

from the cause itself? Not the cause, but I, and I wasn't able very much, as much as I tried to disassociate myself from the words that were being said against me. And even the comedy skits that were done and the cartoons, although in, you know, Brechtrespect, they can be laughed at. As I do, I laugh at them today, particularly the sexual puns are just cringe-worthy.

But, you know, they really are. They're just torturous to listen to. But at the time, and, you know, young people ask me this. And what I love is that this book is finding an audience with young people. So they asked me, well, how would I, how would I respond if I were in your situation day? What would you say you learn? And the first thing I say is, don't do it. as I did. And for anyone who reads the book, you'll find out that I made huge mistakes in my personal life because of this. I retreated. I felt the anger inside. I didn't ever want to vent it. I felt the sting of what was said about me. And so what happened is that a week after the lawsuit was filed, a man came into my life, who was also a sports journalist. Within three weeks, he asked me to marry him, and I said, yes. Now, who would do that?

Who would do that? I did it because I think about it as sort of I'm a sailor. It's as though you're sailing out in a storm, and a storm is coming up. You hear that a squall is coming, and you look for a safe harbor. You look for a place to anchor, bide your time, and, you know, this will pass. So I was, as you say, 26, as a single woman, blonde hair, I guess I was attractive, you know, slender. I was all of those things that they could put into the men, could put into their imaginations as the temptress,

as all of these things, which I made every effort never to appear. I never wore jewelry. I never wore high heels. I don't wear makeup. It wasn't, I wore Laura Ashley dresses to make myself look as sort of feminine and girl-like as I could. You know, they do anything but show cleavage,

of which I had very little, although the cartoonists always drew me with great, you know, a buxom thing. Anyway, so it just was a very hard time. And as I came into this relationship with this man and made this mistake, all of the friends in my life came after me and said, don't do this, don't do this, you can't do this. And instead of listening to them, I push them away. So I tell young people, never do this. Don't ever lose your most trusted friends at that time. You need them more than ever. You need them more than ever. You need them. to be with you, to let you vent, to hear you, to let you speak what you're feeling,

to let it out, to not hold it in. And I didn't do that. And I write about this in the book and sort of the consequences of the mistakes I made. Are you able to give yourself grace, though, knowing the position that you were in and maybe this like sort of helpless feeling that people are construing you to be this person. And let me try to be intentional about how I'm portraying myself. so they think maybe the opposite. You know, it took me a lot of reflection

to write this book about that time. And I wrote many, many versions of this book. And it was only as I began to write more and more and actually feel my fingers on the typewriter really digging into what I experienced and then realized, how am I going to explain this decision? Because it's almost inexplicable. But I began to find the ways.

I went back to some of the journals. I didn't keep an extensive journal, but I kept enough. And I began to piece it together again and better understand, I think, myself as a 26-year-old than I did when I was 26. And I hope it comes through in the book. I hope people give me the grace of understanding through my explanation of what happened. I will also say that it was a very, very difficult decision, but I'll say it because it's in the book, that after the Dobbs decision happened in the course of writing the book, I made the decision, which was very, very difficult for me to write about having an abortion during this time.

And it happened within the same two weeks after my lawsuit was filed. So what I was going through was so tumultuous and so emotionally challenging that I just didn't make the right decisions. And always I understood by then that I represented so much by being the plaintiff that you can only understand what it was like at the time for me to be sure that no one found out that that was happening for me because can you imagine what the uproar would have been? Would it have been different in a legal case? Would the legal case have overlooked that while the public opinion came down on me even harder? Right. I can't tell. I don't know. But at the time it was just absolutely, I didn't know word to turn. I just didn't know what to do. And again, with this man coming in, he just seemed like

a safe harbor. Well, it was very brave of you to write that in the book. And it's also a good reminder of just from a reporter's standpoint, like how little you do know about the interior lives of the people who are the subjects of what is going on. And we can fast forward a little bit. But the echoes of, like I'm curious, your perspective on, for instance, Olivia being here, an award-winning writer, one of the best that we have in the city. As you see the sprouts of what you fought for, we have not come far enough, but like your opinion on just the state of women in sports media today. Olivia is the just, you know, a shining light, and there fortunately are a lot of shining lights now, and that just pleases me to know. And it's such a thrill to meet a little.

Olivia. It was such a thrill last night in Montclair, New Jersey to be with Kelly Whiteside, who actually was a writer assigned to cover baseball at Sports Illustrated two decades after me. I mean, it's just amazing to be going on this book tour and finding people who still come up to me and share their stories about how much they love sports and how they've had this opportunity to be in sports in this way. I always have to put a butt with this. I always have to remind ourselves that it's nearly 50 years after my suit, after my legal case was solved, was finalized. The order came down.

Did it really need to take 50 years for this to really be happening at the extent that it is now? Did it really need to take 50 years after Phyllis George was the first really well-known women broadcaster as Miss America for the networks to change from having basically beautiful. women on the sidelines to putting women in the broadcast booth now within the last five to six years, arguably. You know, did it really need that long a time? And again, in reflection in writing this book, I've come better to understand that if you have a very skillful lawyer, as I did, you have a judge who understands the legal precedent, particularly with the 14th Amendment, which she used in racial discrimination cases, and had just because of our one, wonderful RBG. Ruth Bader Ginsburg had just in 1976 raised the scrutiny for gender because of her fearless, courageous work to stand before judges and be laughed at for bringing women

clients in. And as plaintiffs in saying you ought to be applying gender with the equal protection clause, she laughed out of courtrooms until she brought male plaintiffs in and showed that they were discriminated against a brilliant strategy. But remember, that just happened. year before, my case. So this history is something that is really important to understand and the power of the 14th Amendment. So when we go back and think about the Dobbs case recently and the overturning of what was established law, thank God for me back in the 70s, and we understand

the threat that is held. That's why I wrote that story because I saw so many women coming forward with their own stories and saying, I'm going to voice my experience. This is under threat. I'm going to say it now and say it loud. So the last thing I will say in regard to this is I've looked at the research. And if you go to the AP sports editors reports that they issue every two or three years, and they go and look at the efforts to get diversity in newsrooms, and this includes everyone who picks up AP copy and uses it through the sports wire, they have given in the last two reports. So that covers maybe the last five or six years to gender diversity and F. So this tells us that we have a long ways to go. It tells us that wonderful. Olivia has,

you know, been out in Green Bay. She's now in Philadelphia. She's covering sports. She's covered the NHL. She's now covering football. Fabulous. I mean, this is great. And I know there are others like Olivia out there. But if you look at newsrooms generally, the exception might be like the Washington Post. they had four women covering the four major beats, you're going to find one or two. Right. Maybe three. But those women are going to carry a weight for being a minority voice around the table. It's going to start weighing on them, and then they're going to have to read their news,

their social media, and they're going to see the trails of misogyny that follow them with the sexual objectification, now the death threats, now, you know, all sorts of things that come their way. And as deaf as they are, and I applaud them for it, responding to it, there's an emotional toll that's taken. And the research tells you that it weighs on women and they leave. Because they can do something else that they're not going to face that every day. Is there, Olivia, I mean, I don't want to tokenize you here as the current woman reporter here, but what is that like today? And is there, this is like a, it shouldn't be like this, but is there some strength among the group of female reporters in the NFL?

To answer, yes, the second part of your question first, absolutely. I can't tell you how many group chats I'm in and conversations that I have with other women who cover the NFL, who, you know, my past life covering the flyers, cover the NHL as well. And it is a sisterhood to an extent that we keep in touch. We tell each other about struggles, things that we run into, ask for a job, advice, really anything. And just to have that support, even if you know, you don't necessarily have that support on the ground in Philadelphia, which I'm lucky I do. There are other women reporters here in Philly. But just to be able to have access to those people and their experiences

and their insight, too, has been really nice. So I'm very grateful for that. And I'm also, you know, like I guess everyone's experiences are different and, you know, everything, I don't want to speak for anybody else, but I've, I'm really lucky to have had good positive experiences where I'm not, it doesn't constantly necessarily weigh on me. The fact that I am, you know, a woman or I look different than some of the other reporters, I think there are positives and negatives just to being a different person and having a different background. I think everyone inherently has something unique and different about them that allows them to connect to your subjects differently. And I'm very grateful to be in the position that I'm in and to have been able to make the

relationships that I have, and I wouldn't want it any other way. She has that support system I'm talking about. We didn't have that. The Association for Women in Sports Media only started, I'd say, I think it was 84, 85, so six, eight years, seven years after I had left. I mean, I'm now a member of it, and I've spoken there on panels. We didn't have that, nor did we have the capacity to communicate with each other. We didn't have social media. We didn't have texting. So we were each on our own sort of way. You know, in the NHL, the NBA at various games, we were always the only one. That made it very different. I will say

that I was struck by a story that I read recently. There was a gathering of a, women's sports broadcasters in baseball, and they came together, and they have that same support network. And it's really a very difficult story to tell, but I'll just tell it briefly. There was one of them who found herself in a situation where she was raped by one of the players that she was covering. And as this was happening, and as the player who had locked her in the room, I think, got up to go, maybe perhaps go into the bathroom briefly, the person she texted. The person she texted, not her mother, not her sister, she texted one of the other sports women's sports broadcasters because only they would really understand where she was and the danger she was in and the feelings that she was having at that point.

So there is that sisterhood that you talk about and that is really, really important for them to have to just sustain themselves at this point before we get to the stage, which I hope we'll get to, where the numbers grow. And, you know, you have more of a, of a, you know, kind of seesaw that's more balanced than it is still today. It's still an exception. It's not, you know, it's not equal. If we pivot to the, like, the locker room policies aspect of all of this, I think there is, at the time at least, there would let the misperception that you were suing to get into the locker room, rather suing to get equal rights because the men were in the locker room, right? And so there is now the NFLPA discussion.

They are pushing for reporters to be out of the locker room or at least to do interviews outside the locker room. What's your opinion of like the importance of being in the locker room for reporters and where things stand on that front? Great. Two things. You're right. We could only go to court and ask a federal court to rule, as she eventually did, on the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause. and that was to provide equal access. She could never tell a private entity, like baseball or the Yankees or any other team,

what their media policy should be. All she could say is whatever media policy you create, you have to provide equal access for both genders. We knew from our discovery process and the memos that we found from the commissioner's office that the male sportswriters had made their opinions very clear and sent a cannonball across Cune's bow saying, whatever you do to resolve the Melissa's situation, do not change our access one bit.

And at that point, baseball depended on the free media of newspapers around the country. And so we, in a sense, knew that if the order came for equal access, that baseball would not decide to pull everyone out of the locker room. And I often am asked, well, why should you be there? I mean, what difference does it make? So this is why I have picked the paragraph. I'm going to read to you right now.

And that is a paragraph that I found in Roger Kahn's book, The Boys of Summer. It is the scene after the Brooklyn Dodgers lose to the Yankees in 1953. It is a devastating loss. And here's just a paragraph and try to imagine this paragraph being written by anyone who was outside. of the locker room in a conference room with a scrum of reporters. It's very short. The Dodger Clubhouse was spectrical. If you knew the players and saw them silent, humiliated, it was like crashing into a sick room. Reporters hurried to Carl Ferrillo, who had chide the game by rocking a home run off of Allie Reynolds in the Ninth. I showed him for

Barillo said, I showed him I could come back after breaking that hand. This black-haired, powerful man was dominated by his private triumph. Five minutes after losing the series, he was issuing victory statements. Elsewhere, everywhere, the men with whom I had traveled for two years and whose vitality I had so enjoyed were motionless and sorrowful and waxen. If you have a writer who can tell a story well, that is what you're going to learn as a reader or an observer of the game the next day, as opposed to the stock answers that you're going to get in a scrum of reporters or in a microphone put in a conference room. Yeah, I mean, I think it is inarguable that you get better stories and that serves the public better, but it is also it comes down to the player's rights. And I mean, I want to be in the locker room.

That's the side that I hope wins. But I also, I understand if the players don't want you in there, that is also their prerogative. I don't know. How do you follow, Olivia? Yeah, this is obviously something we've been thinking about and talking about a lot. But to me, like the goal was never just to be in the locker room, to be in there while they're changing, which apparently for the players. is what the issue is. The goal is to be in there,

to be able to create relationships, in order to be able to tell better stories, more colorful stories that really paint the picture of the team, the moment, the season, whatever it may be. And those types of stories are much more difficult to tell if you're sitting in a press conference room. Like this, I don't have my phone on me right now,

which is shocking, but like sticking my phone in your face, record, like, record, Like, you know, that's no way to build a relationship with someone. Those relationships are built when your phone is down, when your recorder is off, often times, and you're not necessarily even looking for anything. You're just looking to get to know the player and establish a sense of trust, too. And I think if we are not in a locker room or something like a locker room,

I think we're going to lose some of that, like just human contact, that ability to build relationships. They're not just lines on a box score. It's our jobs to humanize them in a way and to get their perspective on things and to be able to capture the moment as you as you read there, Melissa. So I fear that if we are not in the locker room that we are not going to have that opportunity. That said, the NHL, I think, does this pretty well in a way that works for everyone where, and granted, the facility at the Eagles, you know, the NovaCare complex is the way it is where it's the locker room and I don't know what the spaces are like behind the scenes, but the flyers have a separate like changing room. from their actual locker room. So no one's really changing other than maybe, you know,

taken off their helmets and their pads in the Flyers locker room after a game or after a practice. They go off to the showers and they change back there, you know, whatever. So the privacy element, if that is the concern of the players, that is. And you can see, I mean, that is fully full circle here because to me, they are using the privacy element as sort of a canard to get what they actually want, which they are entitled to want, for sure.

But in the court of public opinion, if you paint it as, well, you know, they just want to be in there while we're naked, they're going to win that argument. It's the same argument I heard, but let's make one thing exceedingly clear. I was also kept out of the locker room before the game. Right. Now, before the game, for people know,

it's between batting practice and the game. No player changes out of his uniform. No player is any part of his body showing during that time. So if it was about nudity, why was I also excluded from the 50 minutes that as a magazine reporter would have been the best for me? Why were women before me excluded from batting practice? No player is naked. Why were they excluded from the press box? Why were they not allowed to eat with their fellow male sports writers? Why were my colleague at Sports Illustrated Stephanie Salter, thrown out of the baseball writer's gala dinner when all the men are dressed in

tuxedos. There is a tradition with all of this. And let's not forget the ecosystem of media today. You know, Derek Jeter once set up a player's channel, you know, where they could tell their own stories. LeBron James shoots YouTube videos out all the time. They have social media. Now, they want to control their stories. They do not want the press there in many. anyways, because it would be better for them if they just tell their own stories and the press doesn't weigh in on it. Where have we heard that before? I mean, we've heard it in politics. We've heard it all over. So I don't think we can separate this from the larger notion of the, you know, sort of denigration of the role of the press, both in our larger society, but also just

in the value of storytelling. And I'll say lastly, that it was always my understanding that the players might not want us in the locker room, but contractually, they had to give interviews. And so they contractually had to give it. Why? Because their salaries depend on the fact that we tell their stories, both as a broadcast media and now as a digital in print. So I'm, I guess, much more anti-union on this than I would want to be. I mean, generally speaking. Well, that's my problem as well. I think it comes down to, do you believe in the role of the press and sports or not. If so, I think it's my opinion is that we should be in there. I have a writing question for you. Having written this book, what was it like to report on your own life, if that makes sense?

Because there are things that come up in this book that are news to you 40 years later about the experiences of the people around you and things that happened to that you didn't even know about at the time. You're absolutely right. I find in the documents of my case, which I probably spent about two years living in, both in the documents that I had that I gave to the Schlesinger Library on Women in History and I would go visit. But then the visits I made in New York to go through these five boxes, inner office memos, you know, confidential memos that they had found in the discovery process, reading these stories and learning the intricacies of this case, but also finding my letters and all of these kind of personal things. You know, Bo, it's a great question. And it made me,

reflect back, as I said earlier, on my life as a 20-year-old in ways that I really, I never had done before. And it was incredibly challenging. It was only through writing it, too, that it gave me that opportunity to do the level of reflection that I think I needed to do in order to tell this story with the kind of honesty that I felt it deserved. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, And so if you were to look at my early versions, you wouldn't find sort of the level of emotional feeling conveyed. You wouldn't necessarily find either my expressions of frustration or anger because I think I held back on those early on. So it really was a growth process for me of discovering a lot of things about myself. But remained never changing was the memory I had that whatever the men were saying about me was not.

the person that I recognized myself to be. And that same hurt of that and the fact that they didn't even reach out to me. I mean, they knew. The nastiness of so many of the your colleagues. But they also never actually reported. Here were men who were, you know, doing coverage of baseball. And yet they bought hookline and sinker, what we call greenwashing by the commissioner, of saying that he'd already established separate accommodations for women. As I write in this book in two years, I was never offered a separate accommodation of any sort until we were in the World Series. And as I negotiated that I would be given a male escort for the sixth game, which was a huge failure. He was supposed to run in, get players for me. He could only produce two players who

hadn't been in the game. And he brought them out into a corridor that was so loud, That was my separate accommodation, crushed against a cement wall where I couldn't hear them. They couldn't hear me. So, so much for the separate accommodations. But they bought it. They never asked me. Did you have a separate accommodation? What was it like?

Yeah, isn't that journalism 101? Exactly. No, they just decided they knew their story. They knew the humor lines they wanted to put in. To them, it was a funny story. And so when I write this book, I'm writing about the only aspect of my story that wasn't covered. And that was the hearing. It was a public hearing. Not one reporter except a woman from editor and publishing magazine. It's fascinating. Showed up to hear the hearing because they didn't want to

write about people right story. They wanted to write about nudity and the invasion of women and my immorality. That was at that time the clickbait. You know, back in the day. Those were the headlines. The puns from baseball mixed with the puns with sex. And then they bought the paper. So that was the world, you know, we lived in them. We live in it now. Clickbait wins, you know. So writing this book was probably the best thing I've done. I mean, it really is an ability for me to tell my story to my daughter, who's now 28, who was 26 when I actually finished writing the book the same age I was. The parallelism is unbelievable there. And it's for people of her generation who are really craving, craving.

this history. They crave it. They, when they hear it, they just, they're astonished that I'm still alive and telling it, that I'm living history. Yeah. But they want it because they never learned it. They never learned it. And yet, it is the spine of their life. What happened during that, that decade in the fights, you know, that women did for these changes. It's impacted the men and women's lives today who are my daughter's age. No doubt. And yet, they don't know how it happened. And so many of those fights are very much still roiling.

They're being renewed, unfortunately. And that's why in my prolog, I refer to the Dobbs decision and say this book might give you a sense of the power of the 14th Amendment and why we need to hold on to it so hard. Well said. The book is Locker Room Talk. A woman's struggle to get inside. You can buy wherever books are sold.

Melissa, Lucky, thank you so much for taking the time on your book tour. Olivia, thank you so much as well. Thank you. Glad to be a part of it. Absolutely. Thank you, Bo. And thank you, Olivia. It's been just pleasure to meet you, and we're going to stay in touch. Absolutely. I'm afraid we've become new friends.

So there we are. I'm jealous. Bo, thank you. All right, more to come on PHOI.