I actually kind of hate Dave Portnoy. He comes off like a super douche almost all the time. I don’t really want to defend him or give him any positive print, but I also prefer the truth versus attempted character assassinations. So, here we are.
If you hadn’t heard, Business Insider released a story (behind it’s paywall, so you can’t go read it, but I’ll give you the details) that walked right up to the line of accusing Portnoy of raping two women, though they cloaked it in a guise of “violent sexual experiences,” which Portnoy denies.
I am going to keep typing and summing it all up, but if you just want to watch…
Let’s go to the tape:
Anyways, Portnoy starts at the beginning of the Insider ambush with a screenshot of the initial email that was sent to him by Julia Black — the author of the story — that seemed innocent enough. In it, Black sells Portnoy on idea of just focusing on his career, without an angle or agenda.
Now, not knowing Portnoy at all just seeing him from afar, this would be something he probably accepted because no one loves Portnoy more than Portnoy.
He then says that Black and Insider almost immediately shifted away from this puff piece about his career to what becomes a volatile accusation and using his name for publicity. He adds that they reconfigured the story in such a way that it would read as a hit piece on him but written in a way to still protect the publication in court as it implies rape throughout the story without using the exact term so as to avoid libel charges.
“As I’ve come to learn, this was Julia covering her tracks to write a hit piece,” Portnoy said. “They knew what [they were] writing from the beginning. But if I could prove that [they were] always out to make me look like a sexual monster deviant, then I can sue [them]. This is like ‘No, no, we had good intentions.’ Yeah, right.”
He presents more ‘evidence’ that the author was also slanted against Barstool from the onset of the piece.
He cited that Black had deleted thousands of tweets — literally, it was a side-by-side screenshot of Black’s Twitter account before and after Insider published the article. Before the story ran she had a tweet count of 4,151 and then, magically, her count fell to 132.
The tweets included multiple negative posts about Barstool. Portnoy called it the “first red flag.”
He then adds that Insider also started to reach out to Barstool advertisers, not looking for comments on the situation but to materially hurt his business by trying to pressure them into stopping their ad buys with the product.
It is at this point that he really gets into details about the claims. He changed the names of the girls to protect their identity but he brings a lot of receipts about how the relationships actually happened versus how they were reported by Insider.
Here is how they reported it:
While not terribly damning, it is certainly slanted to make it sound like Portnoy was some sexual predator.
Well, he had the receipts and he sent them to Insider who literally did not include them — or his side at all — in the story.
Gotta tell you, victim blaming is a horrible thing and in this case the victim is Portnoy. The girl in this situation was literally asking to have sex with him. And the girl in this situation also told him that she was literally bragging to her friends afterwards, about having sex with him.
That does not read to me like someone who is shook to her core and suffering through some traumatic encounter. I am certainly not a therapist or expert in trauma, but this is all reading like a pretty consensual encounter…
It also does read like Insider predetermined what it was going to do with this story and just kept plowing through despite all the evidence against it.
Heck even Fox News looked into the situation with the police, to which it wrote this:
“[T]he police report shared by Portnoy didn’t accuse him of any wrongdoing and contradicted many of the claims from the article, specifically how police indicated the woman couldn’t remember anything from the encounter despite the fact that she provided multiple details to Insider.”
On the Barstool stream Portnoy states what definitely seems like that truth, she was “dying to hook up with me, that’s how I remember it. She aggressively pursued me. Her mother found out, and rather than deal with the mother, she’s just lied.”
Facts. Smug asshole fact, but facts nonetheless.
The second accuser seems like it was more of a politically motivated, spurned lover. At least to me… and Portnoy, too.
“This girl was extreme, extreme, extreme left,” he said. He then provided some anti-Trump messages that the accuser has posted on her social media feed.
He added that they were a little more than the one-and-done of the previous accuser and that what started out as some no-strings sex evolved into a brief fling that burned out quickly.
In his words, “Now, after we hooked up, we were hanging out more and it just became one of those situations where we just disagreed on just about everything from, you know, is it raining or sunny out? It was oil and vinegar, just two people who did not see the world the same way and that is why she slept on the couch. I do believe, my recollection is, she was still interested in hooking up, and I was like, ‘This just isn’t working. We don’t get along.’ Flew back, I never talked to her again. I never knew she had any issue. It’s the first I heard of it and quite frankly was stunned to read and hear about it. I’m obviously not going to say her name. I don’t want her harassed. If what she’s telling that she didn’t enjoy the experience is true, I had no idea and that’s horrible and I never want to feel that way. But if there was a hidden camera in that room and it wasn’t a he said/she said and someone saw the interaction, there would be absolutely nothing there. I promise you.”
“Ok. Not my proudest fuck.”
Well, that to me, does not sound like someone super impacted by the encounter. Again, I am no expert in this field, but I do have a brain and this stuff certainly doesn’t read like Portnoy is out there sexually assaulting anyone.
Portnoy also acknowledged that he does not have much more recourse against Insider because of how they framed their wording. A lawsuit is unlikely to go in his favor — though he did not rule out dragging them into court — but rather spent the hour defending his reputation with compelling receipts.
The entire video (again, you can watch it all here) is really a great defense. Portnoy comes off like a total dick — which I believe he is — for the entire first five or so minutes but then he gets into the meat of his defense and really tears down the entire story.
One of the other main takeaways that I have here is that women see Portnoy and his behavior and still think, “I need to actively try to fvck this guy.” That to me, is weird.
Portnoy is not attractive — I mean, he is better looking than Pete Davidson — and his personality sucks but he is rich as fvck and I guess that is the key to it all.
