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)