I wrote about Dianna Russini, the constant pressure female reporters face to prove they aren't sleeping with sources (plus the pressure we do get from sources to get involved with them), and why all of this is so uncomfortable to talk about.
Gift link:— Diana Moskovitz (@dianamoskovitz.bsky.social) April 15, 2026 at 3:25 PM
I don’t remember the first time someone hit on me as a reporter. I believe this is because my brain has come to treat these events as unremarkable. For any woman in journalism, they pile up over the years. What I can recall are the worst examples. Like the guy my friends nicknamed Mr. Creepy.
We called him Mr. Creepy (I have changed his nickname somewhat to make it less identifying, but it did include the word “creepy”) because he constantly asked me out for drinks. He could do this because he was one of the officials on my beat—covering several small cities for the Miami Herald, a typical job for an early-career reporter—and “asking a young reporter out for drinks over and over, no matter how many times she says no, even though you’re married, and she can’t choose not to be around you” wasn’t against any city code. It did, however, run against the code of journalists: the very good and obvious rule that getting romantically involved with sources, or even appearing to, is off limits.
I don’t recall saying anything to any of my supervisors at the time about it. Even if I had told someone, there was nothing the paper could do about it. They had no control over him. If anything, saying something would get me moved off my beat, possibly onto one I did not want, and potentially flagged as a complainer. Every other female reporter dealt with it, right? So I dealt with it too.
This was the first thing that came to my mind when longtime NFL reporter turned insider (and there is a vast difference between those two jobs) Dianna Russini was first caught in photos, published by Page Six, looking, shall we say, cozy at an Arizona luxury resort with New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel. With her employer, The Athletic, still investigating, Russini announced on Tuesday that she is resigning with a few months left on her contract…
To be a woman who does reporting in any field, especially one dominated by men, is to put up with a lot of propositions and harassment and unfairness that your newsroom will be unable to do much about. You also must put up with a lot of people assuming you sleep with your sources because they think that this is the only way you as a female reporter can get any information. Despite all of this, you know there is a line you cannot cross. In part, it’s because, journalistically, it is just wrong. But it’s also about self-preservation.
Every time a woman is found to be credibly sleeping with a source—or, in the case of Russini, seen in a position that suggests she might be—the man hardly ever pays. There is no torrent of calls for Vrabel to be fired. But the woman? She always pays.
Excellent Read: <em>“You Can Never Let Them Think They Have A Chance”</em>Post + Comments (41)
