Former ESPN analyst Sage Steele left the company back in August after settling a lawsuit with the network, and now she’s speaking out against ESPN, claiming that the network told her to stop posting about transgender athletes on social media.
During an appearance on the ‘Gaines for Girls’ podcast with anti-trans athlete activist Riley Gaines this week, Sage Steele revealed that ESPN asked her to stop posting negatively about transgender swimmer Lia Thomas on social media.
“I was asked to stop tweeting about it. I was asked to stop doing anything [and] saying anything about it on social media because I was offending others at the company. I made sure I sent up another tweet that night after I received that email because like, no,” Steele told Gaines, according to the New York Post.
Steele claimed that former coworker Samantha Ponder was given the same directive from the network.
“Let’s stop living in this lie,” Steele said. “And once again, oh, you’re going to you’re to silence me and Sam. She was told the same thing, for this issue, but they were going to let everybody else talk about all these other things that are not even related to sports on our sports programming.”
But Steele was not interested in complying with this request from ESPN.
“I already had the lawsuit going. I didn’t know how it was going to end,” Steele said. “But I literally said, ‘This is the hill I will die on 100 percent because it’s facts.’ This is not even my opinion about a vaccine mandate or whatever, these are facts. This is science, this is biology. This is all of the things. Come at me. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me to stop supporting women. Go ahead, tell me.”
Steele recently settled a lawsuit with ESPN in which she claimed that her free speech rights were violated. She left the network in August in order to “exercise my First Amendment rights more freely.”
