This past Friday, Christine Brennan asked to speak with an editor at Defector. The USA Today columnist's request was somewhat expected, since Giri Nathan had written about her in an article published two days earlier, the piece critical of her fixation with measuring the WNBA's success through the singular metric of Caitlin Clark. While writing his article, Giri had reached out to Brennan for comment on what her ideal strategy would be for the league to properly market the Indiana Fever's star player. But Brennan didn't reply to share her multi-point plan. Mostly she wanted to take umbrage with the post's headline: "Christine Brennan Has Fully Lost It Over Caitlin Clark."
For the record, Giri emailed Brennan on Oct. 6, the day before the piece ran. He asked her, "If you were made WNBA commissioner tomorrow, what would be your five-point plan for running a league that has Caitlin Clark in it?" We published the following morning, and Brennan's response came in Wednesday night:
Thank you for your email and my sincere apologies. This went to a spam folder and I just saw it now. As you might know, I’ve covered the WNBA since it began in the late 1990s and have fought very hard for it to get attention from the male-dominated mainstream sports media and national media for whom I work, including USA Today, CNN and ABC News. You can find a lot about my coverage of the WNBA and its incredible advocacy in my book, On Her Game: working to get BG home; being a month ahead of Colin Kaepernick protesting the killing of Black men; working to get Sen. Warnock elected, etc.
To have the opportunity now to get that attention and coverage is something I never thought would happen in my lifetime. And then to witness the rudderless “leadership” of Cathy Engelbert at this crucial moment…well, that’s why I continue to speak out.
As you can see on my social media and in my book, I believe the great Dr. Harry Edwards had it right about preparing for Caitlin Clark’s arrival. I also believe Adam Silver finally needs to engage; this is his legacy too. There are things big and small I’d love to speak with you about: for instance, immediate investigation of the messages Kelsey Mitchell and other players say they are receiving. That should be the highest priority of the new commissioner: investigate everything happening to the players and take the appropriate action. As we know, that happened with Clark’s stalker, who is now in jail.
Also, the W needs a transgender policy. As I’ve said on some recent podcasts, it is the only major sports league or organization without one, as far as I know, which creates the massive controversy we’ve seen the past few months. The W needs to address this issue. It’s not easy but the commissioner needs to be taking this on, not leaving it to the players.
By Friday morning, it became evident that Brennan had responded without knowing that the article had been on Defector's homepage for hours. As the editor of Giri's article, and the person who wrote the headline, I (Samer Kalaf) gave Brennan a call Friday afternoon per her request, and we ended up having a 20-minute conversation. Neither Brennan nor I asked to go off the record. Ultimately, we had a pretty circular discussion. Brennan began by saying that the sociologist and civil rights activist Dr. Harry Edwards, whom she interviewed for her book on Clark, sent her the article and was "shocked" by the headline. She would go on to namedrop Edwards a number of times during our conversation.
I expected Brennan to be mad and allowed her to say her piece; after all, the article was critical of her. But she kept repeating the headline without addressing the writing underneath it. She seemed to be under the impression that the article was drawing a conclusion from just a couple of her recent tweets. In reality, we've been following her work for a while. We're also not the only people in sports media who have noticed that Brennan's WNBA coverage has become embarrassing.
During the 2025 season, Brennan wrote a column about how ticket prices for Fever games plummeted when Clark suffered a muscle strain. Brennan then asked the league for comment three times, because she was ignored. What exactly is WNBA leadership supposed to do about a basketball player hurting her quad? Great question; Brennan didn't really provide a compelling answer. She uses WNBA news in myriad ways to bring up that she wrote about Clark in a book, a portion of which is quoting Brennan's own tweets and columns. At one point in our conversation, she boasted that no one had requested a correction on anything in her book since its publication.
There were times during Friday's phone call in which I felt Brennan was telling me something about herself and waiting for me to be struck with awe or deference. Some of what she said overlapped with the email she sent to Giri. In no particular order, Brennan said: that she has written about the WNBA for decades; that she's on CNN; that she knows Dr. Harry Edwards, who, again, was shocked by the headline; that at USA Today, they wouldn't run a headline like that, and if they did, an apology would follow. For the record, I know who Christine Brennan is, I stand by the headline, and I never expected her to like an article critical of her. I wanted to give her a chance to tell me how she felt, but the long-time columnist thought that this particular opinion about her work demanded a correction, specifically the headline. At one point, Brennan threatened that there were other people she could speak to about this issue; when asked to elaborate, she did not say who those people were. Eventually she asked to speak with Defector's editor-in-chief, Tom Ley.
Tom Ley from Defector here. I spoke with Brennan over the phone for about 30 minutes on Monday. Our conversation was similar to the one she had with Samer, though perhaps a little stranger. One of the first things she told me was that she had previously covered Colin Kaepernick and Doug Williams. She described her book about Clark as the "only journalistic book about one of the most famous athletes in our country," and insisted that the book was the first piece of journalism to cover former WNBA star Maya Moore's activism "in a national way," bringing new attention to it in a "New York Times bestseller." She brought up Dr. Harry Edwards probably a dozen times throughout our conversation.
We hit a bit of a snag about 15 minutes into the call, when I told her that I hadn't considered anything that had been said so far to be off the record, since neither of us had explicitly made that request. After a bit of arguing about whether our conversation was on the record or not, Brennan began recording the call and insisted I do as well, to ensure accuracy. I told her that I was taking notes while talking to her and didn't feel the need to record the call. She was aghast at this, and described what I was doing as "fraud."
We did discuss some specifics. Brennan said she thought the headline on Giri's blog should be changed. When I asked her what she thought it should be changed to, she suggested, "Christine Brennan Writes A Whole Bunch Of Tweets We Don't Like." She also suggested that an editor's note be added to the story: "We did not intend to mock factual tweets of a journalist, or to mock Harry Edwards."
I was then able to ask her Giri's original question, about how the WNBA should be handling itself differently in order to best maximize Clark's marketability. Brennan told me that the answers could be found in her book, then reread portions of the email she sent to Giri. She then went to find a copy of her book so that she could read me the parts in which Dr. Harry Edwards is quoted, but we got sidetracked before she could finish that task.
Finally, Brennan asked if I was planning on changing the headline on Giri's blog or adding an editor's note. I told her I wasn't. She asked if I was comfortable with mocking not only a journalist of her tenure, but also Dr. Harry Edwards. I don't really feel like Giri's post was mocking Dr. Harry Edwards—it mentions him once, via Brennan—but I told her that, yes, I was comfortable with that. She told me my answer was "very revealing," and we ended the call.
Neither of us came away from our conversations with Brennan feeling like we had a better understanding of her critiques of the WNBA. The information we did receive was mostly biographical: Christine Brennan has been a journalist for several decades and sometimes appears on TV, she wrote a bestselling book about Caitlin Clark, and she knows Dr. Harry Edwards. We already knew all that, thanks to her many tweets on the subject. Also, we published a review of her book last year.
