Culture
ESPN’s Pat McAfee and others amplified a false rumor. A teenager’s life was ‘destroyed’
It is Feb. 26, and “The Pat McAfee Show” is filming in Indianapolis the week of the NFL Scouting Combine. McAfee sits behind a desk. Before him is an arc of chairs, occupied by a few of what he describes as his “stooges” and a featured guest: Adam Schefter, ESPN’s NFL insider.
Schefter’s presence and the 2025 NFL Scouting Combine logo behind the chairs seemingly previews the day’s subject matter. However, McAfee has a different topic on his mind.
He teases the subject, asking Schefter: “Have you heard about Ole Miss?” One of his cohorts says, “There is a ménage à trois …” that, McAfee adds, “has really captivated the internet.” After some more buildup, McAfee dives in.
“Some Ole Miss frat bro, k? Had a K-D (Kappa Delta) girlfriend,” McAfee says, and then he stresses the word “allegedly.”
“At this exact moment, this is what is being reported by … everybody on the internet: Dad had sex with son’s girlfriend.” Another person on set chimes in – “Not great” – and then McAfee adds: “And then it was made public … that’s the absolute worst-case situation.”
Schefter, looking befuddled and uncomfortable in the chair closest to McAfee, tries to redirect the conversation: “So where is (Ole Miss quarterback) Jaxson Dart in all this?”
McAfee never names the 18-year-old college freshman at the center of the rumor, but he jokes about shoehorning Ole Miss fathers into NFL Draft analysis — “We’re just wondering. His dad … We’re just trying to combine evaluate …” Then another person on set interjects: “Ole Miss dads are slinging meat right now.”
The segment lasts roughly two minutes. McAfee worked an unsubstantiated internet rumor into his show, then transitioned to analyzing Dart’s draft stock and moved on.
Mary Kate Cornett, the college freshman at the center of the rumor, wishes she could do the same.
Five weeks ago, she was a first-year business major dating another Ole Miss student. Happy. Confident. Outgoing. Then her idyllic freshman experience was pierced on Feb. 25 when a spurious claim about her and her boyfriend’s father spread on YikYak, an anonymous message-based app popular among college students. It then gained traction on X and collided with the sports talk ecosystem to become a top trending topic that day. Many posts featured a picture of Cornett pulled from her Instagram account.
The following day, McAfee became the most influential sports personality to address the rumor when he shared it with his ESPN viewers. (His show also has 2.8 million subscribers on YouTube.) But he was not alone. Former NFL receiver Antonio Brown posted a meme about Cornett on X. Two Barstool personalities — KFC Barstool and Jack Mac — referenced the rumor on their personal social media accounts (the former posted a video that was later deleted, and Mac promoted a memecoin with Cornett’s name on X). ESPN radio hosts in St. Louis eagerly dissected the “saga” on their morning show, with Doug Vaughn, a longtime local sportscaster-turned-host, doing a dramatic reading of a purported Snapchat message that accompanied one of the original posts. The station then promoted the clip on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram as part of an “Infidelity Alley” segment.
“When the more popular people started posting, that’s when it really, really changed,” Cornett said, adding that they brought legitimacy to “something completely false.”
As the rumor spread, Cornett removed her name from outside her dorm room, but she still had vile messages slipped under her door. Campus police told her she was a target, and she moved into emergency housing and switched to online courses.
Houston police showed up to her mother’s house, guns drawn, in the early hours of Feb. 27, in an apparent instance of “swatting” – when someone falsely reports a crime in hopes of dispatching emergency responders to a residence. According to security camera footage and a police report reviewed by The Athletic, the homicide division responded to the call.
After her phone number was posted online, Cornett’s voicemail was filled with degrading messages. In one, a man laughs as he says that she’s been a “naughty girl” and cheerfully asks her to give him a call. Another male caller says that he has a son, too, in case she’s interested. Several people texted her obscene messages, calling her a “whore” and a “slut” and advised her to kill herself.
“The only way I could describe it is it’s like you’re walking with your daughter on the street, holding her hand, and a car mirror snags her shirt and starts dragging her down the road. And all you can do is watch,” Cornett’s father, Justin, said. “You can’t catch the car. You can’t stop it from happening. You just have to sit there and watch your kid be destroyed.”
Cornett eventually released a statement on Instagram calling the accusations “false,” “inexcusable” and “disturbing.” Her boyfriend labeled the rumor “unequivocally false” in his own post. Justin Cornett posted on Facebook that he had enlisted a private investigator to probe the “defamatory” cyberattack; he also said the family had contacted Oxford police, Ole Miss campus security and the FBI about the matter. (The Oxford police department is investigating the matter.)
Cornett engaged legal representation and said she intends to take action against McAfee and ESPN, which airs his show, and potentially others involved in spreading the rumor. “I would like people to be held accountable for what they’ve done,” she said. “You’re ruining my life by talking about it on your show for nothing but attention, but here I am staying up until 5 in the morning, every night, throwing up, not eating because I’m so anxious about what’s going to happen for the rest of my life.”
An ESPN spokesperson declined to comment. McAfee, KFC Barstool and Jack Mac did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Monica Uddin, Cornett’s Houston-based attorney, said her legal team may also explore action against those who may have promoted the rumor in an attempt to profit from a cryptocurrency play. According to GeckoTerminal, a cryptocurrency tracking website, the memecoin with Cornett’s name was created on Feb. 25 and surged at around 11 a.m. on Feb. 26.
“This is just a Wild West version of a very familiar problem,” Uddin said. “It’s just that it’s even worse because it’s not a company. It’s an 18-year-old girl.”
Sitting in a conference room at a hotel about 90 miles from Oxford — a location she chose because of its distance from the Ole Miss campus — Cornett expressed bewilderment as to why McAfee and other sports media personalities would amplify a false claim that has nothing to do with sports. She is also angry that they would be so callous.
“They don’t think it matters, because they don’t know who I am and they think that I deserve it,” Cornett said. “But I don’t.”
Added Uddin: “They elevated a lie from the worst corners of (X) to millions of general sports fans just to get a few more clicks and ultimately a few more dollars. While they don’t have to deal with it after it airs, the lie is chained to Mary Kate for the rest of her life.”
Since his show began airing on ESPN in 2023, McAfee described WNBA player Caitlin Clark as a “White bitch.” (He later apologized.) On X, he made a joke about former Michigan State and USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, who sexually abused hundreds of young girls and women. (He defended the reference in the midst of what he described as an “all-out onslaught” of backlash.) Aaron Rodgers, the NFL quarterback, used a paid appearance on McAfee’s show to falsely suggest that talk show host Jimmy Kimmel was linked to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. McAfee apologized “for being a part of it.”
McAfee, his sidekicks and some of his guests are proud provocateurs, well aware of the line they toe. Consider the disclaimer that runs at the opening of McAfee’s show:
Even Vaughn in St. Louis, who occupies a lower rung on the sports media ladder, nods to the places he may go. His bio on X states: “Opinions are my own except for the ones that could get me in legal trouble.” (Vaughn did not respond to a request for comment.)
But their embrace of a falsehood about a non-public figure in the pursuit of internet clout or a bigger audience or, as the disclaimer says, to be “comedic informative,” carries a human cost.
In recent weeks, Cornett has remained mostly holed up in her room. She no longer dines at her sorority house or the student union. On the rare occasion she goes out, she wears sunglasses and a hat. “I (can’t) even walk on campus without people taking pictures of me or screaming my name or saying super vulgar, disgusting things to me,” she said.
She hoped that isolating would allow the storm to pass, but it persisted. During a recent writing prompt in an online class, one of her classmates took a screenshot of her entry and posted it online. “I just feel defeated, honestly,” Cornett said.
She has turned to her family, friends and her boyfriend for comfort, but they have been impacted as well. Her boyfriend has also been bullied online and tormented on campus. Cornett’s 89-year-old grandfather received a call in the middle of the night; the caller taunted him about his granddaughter.
Cornett doesn’t know if the false accusation will one day cost her a job she wants. She worries that the children she hopes to have someday will go online and read about something she never did. And those that care for her feel equally helpless.
“These folks … they can just say whatever they want and destroy a young girl’s life forever,” said Justin Cornett. “When you begin to have a following like (they do), you have a responsibility to society and to the people you speak about. You have to know the impact of what you might be saying and how it might affect them. And to not consider that is ignorant and naive at best, and malicious and deceitful and hurtful at worst.
“No one’s safe from this sort of attack. It could happen to you, it could happen to someone you love.”
Before he broadcast the rumor about Cornett to his masses, McAfee opened his Feb. 26 show talking about his young daughter, how he took her to Disney World (Disney is ESPN’s parent company) and how witnessing his daughter’s “pure joy” brought tears to his eyes.
“Am I a big, sappy softy now that I have a daughter?” he asked his stooges. “I think so.”
— The Athletic’s Carson Kessler contributed to this report.
(Illustration: John Bradford, Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Sean Gardner / Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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