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)
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights the starting points or destinations of five novels about road trips. (Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, most questions offer an additional hint about the location.) To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
In the midst of the world’s unrelenting horribleness, it’s important to make room for beauty. True! But also something of a truism, an idea that comes to hand a little too easily to be trusted. The proclamation that art matters — that, in difficult times, it helps — can sound like a shopworn self-care mantra.
So instead of musing on generalities, maybe we should focus our attention on a particular aesthetic experience. Instead of declaring the importance of art, we could look at a painting. Or we could read a poem.
A poem, as it happens, about looking at a painting.
Hayden did not take the act of seeing for granted. His eyesight was so poor that he described himself as “purblind”; as a child he was teased for his thick-framed glasses. Monet’s Giverny paintings, whose blurriness is sometimes ascribed to the painter’s cataracts, may have revealed to the poet not so much a new way of looking as one that he already knew.
Read in isolation, this short poem might seem to celebrate — and to exemplify — an art divorced from politics. Monet’s depiction of his garden, like the garden itself, offers a refuge from the world.
But “Selma” and “Saigon” don’t just represent headlines to be pushed aside on the way to the museum. They point toward the turmoil that preoccupied the poetry of Hayden and many of his contemporaries.
“Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’” was published in a 1970 collection called “Words in the Mourning Time.” The title poem is an anguished response to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and to the deepening quagmire in Vietnam. Another poem in the volume is a long elegy for Malcolm X. Throughout his career (he died in 1980, at 66), Hayden returned frequently to the struggles and tragedies of Black Americans, including his own family.
Born in Detroit in 1913, Hayden, the first Black American to hold the office now known as poet laureate of the United States, was part of a generation of poets — Gwendolyn Brooks, Dudley Randall, Margaret Danner and others — who came of age between the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts movement of the ’60s.
A poet of modernist sensibilities and moderate temperament, he didn’t adopt the revolutionary rhetoric of the times, and was criticized by some of his more radical peers for the quietness of his voice and the formality of his diction.
But his contemplative style makes room for passion.
Ever since the mad scientist Frankenstein cried, “It’s alive!” in the 1931 classic film directed by James Whale, pop culture has never been the same.
Few works of fiction have inspired more adaptations, re-imaginings, parodies and riffs than Mary Shelley’s tragic 1818 Gothic novel, “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus,” the tale of Victor Frankenstein, who, in his crazed quest to create life, builds a grotesque creature that he rejects immediately.
The story was first borrowed for the screen in 1910 — in a single-reel silent — and has directly or indirectly spawned hundreds of movies and TV shows in many genres. Each one, including Guillermo del Toro’s new “Frankenstein,” streaming on Netflix, comes with the same unspoken agreement: that we collectively share a core understanding of the legend.
Here’s a look at the many ways the central themes that Shelley explored, as she provocatively plumbed the human condition, have been examined and repurposed time and again onscreen.
“I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.”— Victor Frankenstein, Chapter 3
The Mad-Scientist Creator
Shelley was profuse in her descriptions of the scientist’s relentless mind-set as he pursued his creation, his fixation on generating life blinding him to all the ramifications.
Sound familiar? Perhaps no single line in cinema has distilled this point better than in the 1993 blockbuster “Jurassic Park,” when Dr. Ian Malcolm tells John Hammond, the eccentric C.E.O. with a God complex, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
Among the beloved interpretations that offer a maniacal, morally muddled scientist is “The Curse of Frankenstein” (1957), the first in the Hammer series.
“Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (1994), directed by Kenneth Branagh, is generally considered the most straightforward adaptation of the book.
More inventive variations include the flamboyant Dr. Frank-N-Furter, who creates a “perfect man” in the 1975 camp favorite “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
In Alex Garland’s 2015 thriller, “Ex Machina,” a reclusive, self-obsessed C.E.O. builds a bevy of female-like humanoids.
And in the 1985 horror comedy “Re-Animator,” a medical student develops a substance that revives dead tissue.
Then there are the 1971 Italian gothic “Lady Frankenstein” and the 2023 thriller “Birth/Rebirth,” in which the madman is in fact a madwoman.
“With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.”— Victor Frankenstein, Chapter 5
The Moment of Reanimation
Shelley is surprisingly vague about how her scientist actually accomplishes his task, leaving remarkable room for interpretation. In a conversation with The New York Times, del Toro explained that he had embraced this ambiguity as an opportunity for imagination, saying, “I wanted to detail every anatomical step I could in how he put the creature together.”
Filmmakers have reimagined reanimation again and again. See Mel Brooks’s affectionate 1974 spoof, “Young Frankenstein,” which stages that groundbreaking scene from Whale’s first movie in greater detail.
Other memorable Frankensteinian resurrections include the 1987 sci-fi action movie “RoboCop,” when a murdered police officer is rebooted as a computerized cyborg law enforcer.
In the 2012 Tim Burton animated “Frankenweenie,” a young scientist revives his beloved dog by harnessing lighting.
And in the 2019 psychologically bleak thriller “Depraved,” an Army surgeon, grappling with trauma, pieces together a bundle of body parts known as Adam.
“Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?”— The creature, Chapter 15
The Wretched Creature
In Shelley’s telling, the creature has yellow skin, flowing black hair, white teeth and watery eyes, and speaks eloquently, but is otherwise unimaginably repulsive, allowing us to fill in the blanks. Del Toro envisions an articulate, otherworldly being with no stitches, almost like a stone sculpture.
It was Whale’s 1931 “Frankenstein” — based on a 1927 play by Peggy Webling — and his 1935 “Bride of Frankenstein” that have perhaps shaped the story’s legacy more than the novel. Only loosely tethered to the original text, these films introduced the imagery that continues to prevail: a lumbering monster with a block head and neck bolts, talking like a caveman.
In Tim Burton’s 1990 modern fairy tale “Edward Scissorhands,” a tender humanoid remains unfinished when its creator dies, leaving it with scissor-bladed prototypes for hands.
In David Cronenberg’s 1986 body horror, “The Fly,” a scientist deteriorates slowly into a grotesque insectlike monster after his experiment goes wrong.
In the 1973 blaxploitation “Blackenstein,” a Vietnam veteran who lost his limbs gets new ones surgically attached in a procedure that is sabotaged.
Conversely, in some films, the mad scientist’s experiment results in a thing of beauty: as in “Ex Machina” and Pedro Almodóvar’s 2011 thriller, “The Skin I Live In,” in which an obsessive plastic surgeon keeps a beautiful woman imprisoned in his home.
And in Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 sci-fi dramedy, “Poor Things,” a Victorian-era woman is brought back to life after her brain is swapped with that of a fetus.
“I am an unfortunate and deserted creature; I look around, and I have no relation or friend upon earth.”— The creature, Chapter 15
The All-Consuming Isolation
The creature in “Frankenstein” has become practically synonymous with the concept of isolation: a beast so tortured by its own existence, so ghastly it repels any chance of connection, that it’s hopelessly adrift and alone.
What’s easily forgotten in Shelley’s tale is that Victor is also destroyed by profound isolation, though his is a prison of his own making. Unlike most takes on the story, there is no Igor-like sidekick present for the monster’s creation. Victor works in seclusion and protects his horrible secret, making him complicit in the demise of everyone he loves.
The theme of the creator or the creation wallowing in isolation, physically and emotionally, is present across adaptations. In Steven Spielberg’s 2001 adventure, “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” a family adopts, then abandons a sentient humanoid robot boy programmed to love.
In the 2003 psychological horror “May,” a lonely woman with a lazy eye who was ostracized growing up resolves to make her own friend, literally.
And in the 1995 Japanese animated cyberpunk “Ghost in the Shell,” a first-of-its-kind cyborg with a human soul struggles with its place amid humanity.
“Shall each man find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone?”— The creature, Chapter 20
The Desperate Need for Companionship
In concert with themes of isolation, the creators and creations contend with the idea of companionship in most “Frankenstein”-related tales — whether romantic, familial or societal.
In the novel, Victor’s family and his love interest, Elizabeth, are desperate for him to return from his experiments and rejoin their lives. When the creature demands a romantic partner and Victor reneges, the creature escalates a vengeful rampage.
That subplot is the basis for Whale’s “The Bride of Frankenstein,” which does offer a partner, though there is no happily ever after for either.
Sometimes the monster finds love with a human, as in “Edward Scissorhands” or the 2024 horror romance “Lisa Frankenstein,” in which a woman falls for a reanimated 19th-century corpse.
In plenty of other adaptations, the mission is to restore a companion who once was. In the 1990 black comedy “Frankenhooker,” a science whiz uses the body parts of streetwalkers to bring back his fiancée, also Elizabeth, after she is chewed up by a lawn mower.
In John Hughes’s 1985 comedy, “Weird Science,” a couple of nerdy teenage boys watch Whale’s 1931 classic and decide to create a beautiful woman to elevate their social standing.
While the plot can skew sexual — as with “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” “Ex Machina” and “Frankenhooker” — it can also skew poignant. In the 1991 sci-fi action blockbuster “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” a fatherlike bond forms between a troubled teenage boy and the cyborg sent to protect him.
Or the creature may be part of a wholesome, albeit freakish, family, most famously in the hit 1960s shows “The Addams Family,” with Lurch as the family’s block-headed butler, and “The Munsters,” with Herman Munster as a nearly identical replica of Whale’s creature.
In Shelley’s novel, the creature devotes itself to secretly observing the blind man and his family as they bond over music and stories. While sitcom families like the Munsters and the Addamses may seem silly by comparison, it’s a life that Shelley’s creature could only have dreamed of — and in fact did.
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