The escalating stalking problem in sports
Sports Media with Richard Deitsch
Audacy
4.5 • 757 Ratings
🗓️ 13 August 2025
⏱️ 31 minutes
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Summary
Episode 535 of the Sports Media Podcast features Carson Kessler, an investigative reporter for The Athletic and a former investigative fellow at the New York Times. In this podcast, Kessler discusses her reporting on the escalating stalking problem in sports and how it particularly has escalated for prominent female athletes; The Athletic identifying at least 52 stalking cases involving athletes, male and female, since 2020; how this story came to Kessler; her reporting on UCLA women's basketball player Kiki Rice being stalked; whether colleges are in position to help athletes; how often this happens to male athletes and who stalks male athletes versus female athletes; why less than a third of stalking victims report their situations to police, according to a study published by the U.S. Department of Justice; what organizations help victims of stalking and more. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the sports media podcast. I'm your host, Richard Dyche. My producer's Patrick Antonetti. One guest this week, Carson Kessler is an investigative reporter for the |
| 0:23.3 | athletic. Prior to working at the athletic, she was an investigative fellow at the New York |
| 0:27.1 | Times and also worked at ProPublica. On Tuesday, she published a vitally important piece that I would |
| 0:34.2 | encourage everybody to read, and it's on the escalating stalking problem in sports. |
| 0:39.3 | And particularly how that has escalated for prominent female athletes. |
| 0:44.6 | As part of Carson's reporting and some of my other colleagues at the athletic, |
| 0:49.0 | they identified at least 52 stalking cases involving athletes male and female since 2020. |
| 0:54.1 | But that list, of course, |
| 0:55.2 | is incomplete because many stalking cases, they go unreported to the police. And many of those |
| 1:02.9 | cases obviously are never written when it comes to media coverage. And with that, I bring in |
| 1:09.2 | Carson Kessler. Carson, welcome to the sports media podcast. |
| 1:12.3 | Hi, thanks for having me. All right. So let's start here. How did this, how did this story come to you? |
| 1:18.6 | So our entire team was really interested in looking into stalkers because we saw a huge uptick of stalking incidences involving Caitlin Clark, Paige Becker's, |
| 1:32.8 | Emma Radical Kanu, across sports. |
| 1:35.4 | So my editor really wanted us to try to answer the question, why is this happening? |
| 1:41.2 | And is it new? |
| 1:43.0 | Is it rising? Just all the questions involving stalkers and athletes. |
| 1:48.1 | When it comes to a piece like this, in the midst of your reporting process, do you have to make a decision at some point that you want to focus on a singular subject to tell a broader story, or did you also contemplate maybe |
| 2:04.2 | rather than focusing on a singular subject, you sort of tell the story in, I don't know if |
| 2:12.5 | trend is the right word, but you know what I'm saying? Much more broader where it's sort of |
| 2:16.4 | statistically based as maybe opposed to individually based. Right. So this is actually one piece of a larger series |
| 2:24.2 | and coming up there will be a very in-depth look at a specific case, which my colleague Nathan Finno wrote. |
... |
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