Women Say Barstool Sports Founder Dave Portnoy Subjected Them To Violent, Humiliating Sex

Business Insider published a report Thursday morning that included details of three sexual encounters between Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy and young women he met online. The women described their experiences with Portnoy as traumatic and humiliating.

Madison (a pseudonym given to her by Business Insider) was a 20-year-old college student when she began exchanging direct messages with Portnoy, who was 43 at the time. Eventually, she was invited to stay at Portnoy's house in Nantucket, where she said she had sex with Portnoy once and spent the next two nights sleeping on his couch because of the trauma from the experience. From the article:

Another incident in the article involved a woman who was not given a pseudonym and did not go into as much detail, but had an experience similar to Madison's:

The third incident came from a 19-year-old woman named Allison (also a pseudonym) who had just graduated high school and was staying at her parents' house in Nantucket. She told Business Insider that she began sending messages to Portnoy to try and get her and her friends invited to a party at his house. Portnoy told her that he didn't want her friends coming over, but they continued to message each other a week later. Allison eventually went to Portnoy's house one afternoon, at which point they had sex. Allison described her experience to Business Insider:

Allison told Business Insider that word eventually got around the island that she had gone to Portnoy's house, which caused her extreme anxiety and depression. She said that three nights after having sex with Portnoy, she began having suicidal thoughts and had to be checked into a hospital.

A few hours after Business Insider's story was published, Portnoy released a 12-minute video response on his Twitter page.

Portnoy described the allegations against him as "jarring," and said, "If I read them, not knowing me, I'd be like, 'This guy belongs behind bars,' basically." Portnoy admitted that he had sex with both Madison and Allison, but denied that anything non-consensual happened. He described his encounter with Madison as a "totally normal, fine interaction." Portnoy did not deny that she spent the next two nights sleeping on his couch, but claimed it was because the two of them "did not get along" and "did not see the world the same way." He then showed flirtatious DMs that he had exchanged with Allison following their encounter in an attempt to undermine the credibility of her story. At no point did Portnoy deny committing the specific acts described by Madison and Allison.

At one point, Portnoy tipped off the preparation he had done for this statement. "My lawyers have been like, 'Don't even acknowledge that you know who this person is—anonymous is better because people can just throw it away,'" he said.

Portnoy attributed the existence of the Business Insider report to the fact that the "cancel culture" wants to take him down. He said that Julia Black, who wrote the article, reached out to "tons of girls," some that he'd had sexual encounters with, over the course of the last eight months to ask them about their experiences, as if that was supposed to illustrate anything other than a sign of the reporter's care and diligence.

Even taken at face value, Portnoy's denials and explanations don't paint a very flattering picture. The most charitable image of him that one can come away with is one in which he is a 44-year-old man who regularly invites women recently out of high school into his home in order to have rough sex with them while recording them without explicit permission.

"I'm scared now," Portnoy said. "I'm scared now because they're asking for more. They're asking the internet, 'Tell us bad stories about Dave Portnoy.'"

If you have any stories you'd like to tell about Dave Portnoy, we can be reached at tips@defector.com.