In the midst of yet another apocalyptic news cycle, nothing lifts my spirits more than a good old-fashioned sex scandal. And what’s this? It appears that Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel, who once told the world he’d cut off his own penis to win a Super Bowl, has decided to make good use of that penis while it’s still attached to his body. Tuesday night, Page Six ran a series of photos showing Vrabel getting up close and personal with The Athletic's NFL insider Dianna Russini at an adults-only, honeymooner resort in Sedona, Ariz. Both Vrabel and Russini are married, just not to each other. They also each have two kids … again, not with one another. Oh shit.
While the Post didn’t get hard evidence of these two in flagrante delicto, they did score multiple photos of Vrabel and Russini holding hands, hugging, soaking in the hot tub, and just generally doing shit that people who are fucking each other tend to do. The Post also had sources at the resort offer a few more irresistible details:
Both Russini and Vrabel insist they were there with friends and say they simply weren’t visible in the pictures. A source close to Russini says she was staying at the hotel during a hiking trip with two female pals. One of Vrabel’s friends told Page Six that they and the coach drove up to Sedona for the day with another pal and that they all drove back to their own hotel, some two hours away, after hanging out with Russini and her gang.
BUT…?!
But three other eyewitnesses told us that they did not see anyone else with Vrabel, 50, and Russini, 43. Asked if the Pats coach visited the hotel with a group of friends, one eyewitness said: “No, he was with a girl.” And our sequence of photographs taken at various points during the day show only Vrabel and Russini.
This isn’t the only time Russini has stood accused of getting too close with one of her sources. Back in 2015, the wife of then-Commanders GM Scot McCloughan publicly accused Russini of blowing her husband in exchange for scoopage:
In classic Dan Snyder fashion, his team’s PR lackey, Tony Wyllie, dismissed the Jessica McCloughan Twitter account as a fake before McCloughan herself confirmed, in a subsequent public statement, that the tweets were indeed her own. McCloughan disavowed her accusations against Russini, and deleted the offending tweets. A year later, Snyder fired her husband anyway. Four years after that, Snyder subpoenaed McCloughan in an attempt to out her as the source behind stories of Snyder being tied to Jeffrey Epstein. Really nasty shit.
Snyder is no longer an NFL owner, but his clumsy brand of damage control has clearly rubbed off on the principles in this latest kerfuffle. Vrabel told the Post that its story was “laughable,” which is true but not in the way he means it. Russini told the paper that the photos didn’t include all of the other rowdy friends the pair brought with them to the resort. Perhaps these friends were simply cropped out of the photo in which Russini and Vrabel were interlocking fingers and staring into each other's eyes, or while the two were standing on the rooftop of one of the hotel's romantic bungalows. We can't rule out the possibility!
But the clumsiest response of all came from Russini’s boss at The Athletic, Steven Ginsberg:
"These photos are misleading and lack essential context. These were public interactions in front of many people. Dianna is a premier journalist covering the NFL and we’re proud to have her at the Athletic."
Things will only get uglier from here. Russini's female colleagues are going to have to put up with more trolling and abuse from misogynistic fans who will hold these photos up as proof that every woman on the beat slept her way into a job, and The New York Times will further sully its current, miserable reputation if it continues to stand by a reporter who appears to have violated the cardinal rule of "Please don’t fuck your sources." But again, the world is on fire, and I'll take any relatively stupid distraction that I can get. If the Times doesn't step in and fire Russini, it will at least be entertaining to see how long she and Vrabel are willing to go on insisting that it's totally normal for two professional acquaintances to meet up at Hedonism VI.
