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Julie Stewart-Binks on a career derailed by alleged sexual assault: ‘What could my life have been?’

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Julie Stewart-Binks on a career derailed by alleged sexual assault: ‘What could my life have been?’

Last week, Julie Stewart-Binks sat in an empty lounge on the rooftop of a hotel near her apartment in New York City. She is about to watch a clip from her time as a Fox Sports host and reporter. It is a moment that she thinks about often, but one that she has never wanted to relive in full. She hits play on the video, then her hands jerk back toward her chest, as if bracing for a blow.

In the clip, Stewart-Binks, then a 28-year-old Fox Sports 1 on-air personality, is on the set of a pop-up show – “Jason Whitlock’s House Party By the Bay” – for the 2016 Super Bowl in San Francisco. The set is meant to evoke a Super Bowl party. Red Solo cups. Beers chilling in an ice bucket on the coffee table. Whitlock and the day’s guest – New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski – are behind a desk; Stewart-Binks is on a gray couch flanking them.

The group is discussing Gronkowski’s disclosure that he moonlighted as a stripper in college. Stewart-Binks then says: “If you have a chance to make some more money, using maybe me as an example, do you want to show us a little ‘Magic Mike?’” (A reference to the 2012 movie about male exotic dancers.) Gronkowski, a little surprised, asks Stewart-Binks if she wants a lap dance, to which she replies: “Yeah.” Gronkowski seems to be stalling. He asks about music and remarks: “Where are your friends? I would need, like, a bachelorette party?” Stewart-Binks keeps urging him on, as does Whitlock, and Gronkowski eventually moves from behind the desk, over to the couch. He dances briefly in front of Stewart-Binks, then straddles her and thrusts his hips toward her, grinding on her as the cameras roll. Stewart-Binks, laughing, takes out some crumpled dollar bills and hands them to Gronkowski. The dancing lasts about six seconds.

As she watches the clip, Stewart-Binks’ face reddens and her chest breaks out in hives. She begins to cry. “I will spend my entire life trying to make up for this,” she says, wiping away tears with a shaking hand. “I will die trying to make up for this moment that’s clearly not who I am.”

The Gronkowski segment was the defining moment in Stewart-Binks’ four years at FS1 (2013-16). As the clip spread across the internet, FS1 was derided as a “circus act,” but Stewart-Binks took the brunt of the criticism. She was accused of setting back the efforts of women working in sports journalism and betraying feminism entirely. Some of the criticism came from friends and colleagues.

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Now, she wants those critics to know why she participated in the segment, and providing that context requires sharing what she says happened to her in the days beforehand.

On Friday, Stewart-Binks, 37, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court against Fox and Charlie Dixon, an executive vice president and head of content at Fox Sports and FS1, the company’s sports network. In that lawsuit, she alleges that about a week before the Gronkowski segment she was sexually assaulted by Dixon during a meeting at a hotel that he organized under the auspices of talking about her Super Bowl week duties. Dixon is also a defendant in a lawsuit filed earlier this month by former FS1 hairstylist Noushin Faraji. In Faraji’s complaint, she claimed that “executives and talent were allowed to physically and verbally abuse workers with impunity,” and she alleged that Dixon groped her at a co-worker’s birthday party in January 2017, among other allegations.

Dixon did not respond to text, voice and email messages seeking comment. Fox Sports said in a statement: “These allegations are from over eight years ago. At the time, we promptly hired a third-party firm to investigate and addressed the matter based on their findings.”

Days after the alleged assault, when producers in San Francisco told her that FS1 wanted a viral moment out of Gronkowski, she said she never considered the implications of the stunt, only what would happen if she refused with Dixon watching from the set. “I was in a really f—ed-up place that I could not tell people about,” she said.

In her complaint, Stewart-Binks said she detailed the allegations against Dixon to a Fox human resources official in 2017 but that Fox “egregiously made the deliberate decision to protect Dixon and allow a sexual predator to remain an executive at Fox for nearly a decade.”

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“They knew and didn’t do anything about it,” Stewart-Binks said in an interview earlier this month. “It meant they didn’t care about the damage done to me and how it affected others.” She then added: “This has been accepted for so long. I’m sitting here wanting it to be different.”


Fox Sports executive vice president Charlie Dixon in 2018. (Travis P. Ball / Getty Images)

Stewart-Binks grew up in Toronto, and her mother was a broadcast reporter and her father worked in the medical device industry. She played right wing on a boys’ house league hockey team and also trained as a figure skater and a cellist.

She attended Queen’s University and obtained degrees in both drama and physical and health education but developed a passion for broadcasting and later got a master’s degree in international broadcast journalism from what is now known as City St George’s, University of London.

Her entry into sports journalism in Canada was scrappy and unglamorous. She covered Ontario Hockey League games on a volunteer basis, staying at a friend’s house in Kingston, then taking a bus to Niagara, where she’d bunk with her grandmother in a retirement community. Later, as a reporter and anchor for CTV in Regina, Saskatchewan, she drove across the Canadian prairies shooting and editing sports television packages on curling and anchoring the nightly newscasts. To save money, she lived out of a friend’s basement.

In 2013, she was plucked out of relative obscurity by an agent at Octagon (the late John Ferriter) and flown to Los Angeles to meet with Fox Sports executives and screen test for the launch of FS1. She was hired by the fledgling network as an update anchor and went on to host “Fox Soccer Daily.” She also worked as a sideline reporter for Major League Soccer, hosted FS1’s coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics and covered the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup. She spent 65 days on the road that summer and was tabbed as one of Awful Announcing’s “Rising Stars.”

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But, according to her complaint, by early 2016, her allies within FS1 — executives like Scott Ackerson and Rick Jaffe — had departed and a new regime — Dixon and fellow executive Jamie Horowitz — were in place with a new vision for the network.

Stewart-Binks still liked her job. She got to cover soccer and hockey – sports she loved – and work as an anchor and a host. She was part of a tight-knit group that helped launch FS1. But her future was uncertain. The network had until April 1, 2016, to pick up a one-year option in her contract. If it did not, she would lose a high-profile job. She felt she needed to show the Dixon-Horowitz regime that she was a versatile and dynamic talent.

When Whitlock requested her to be a part of his show during the 2016 Super Bowl week, she felt she had an opening to do that. And then Dixon asked her to come to his hotel, writing that he wanted to “go over expectation(s)” before a group meeting the next day, according to her complaint. After receiving that text, Stewart-Binks shared her excitement with a friend about getting face time with her boss and curated her outfit for the meeting – a suede jacket and designer heels – hoping to convey style and professionalism.

The lawsuit sets out in detail how they met at the bar at a hotel in Marina del Rey, Calif. She ordered a single glass of white wine. Dixon asked what she had been told about her role on Whitlock’s show during Super Bowl week. He then told her he didn’t think she should be going to the Super Bowl at all and that she was ill-suited to host and wasn’t funny or interesting or talented enough to draw in viewers.

In an interview, Stewart-Binks said she was shocked and confused by Dixon’s remarks. Why was he denigrating her so strongly, and, just before she went on an important assignment for the network? She tried to stay calm, even when he remarked, according to the complaint, that the only way anyone would be willing to watch her was if she “got up on this bar and took your top off” and then added: “You’re not hot enough to be a hot girl on TV.” She said in her interview with The Athletic that she responded to Dixon: “I didn’t get my master’s degree in ‘hot girl.’”

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Stewart-Binks said Dixon’s tone then changed. He stopped criticizing her and asked about her professional aspirations. The complaint states that Dixon then ordered two beers from the bar and urged her to come to his room and drink them, adding that he had a great view from his balcony. She didn’t think it was a good idea, she said in her interview and in the complaint, but she felt she couldn’t say no to her boss.

“You have autonomy over yourself to say ‘no’ and leave. But you don’t, and you say ‘yes’ because he held the power to everything,” Stewart-Binks told The Athletic.

The legal complaint describes Dixon’s shirts – colorful tees with slogans and pictures – laid out on one of the beds in his room. Dixon suggested they step out on the balcony. Once outside, Dixon, according to the complaint, “swiftly pushed her against the wall of the hotel and pinned her arms to her side. With her arms forcefully held down and his body pressed against hers, Dixon tried to force his tongue into her mouth.” Stewart-Binks’ mouth remained shut but Dixon “ignored her, continuing to press against her body and lick her closed mouth. While keeping one of her arms pinned, he moved his other arm from pressing her upper elbow against the wall to her body and towards her chest. Stewart-Binks seized the moment of partial freedom to push him away, say ‘get off of me’ and rapidly leave the hotel room.”

Once in her car, she called the same friend with whom she had earlier shared her excitement about meeting with Dixon. “I remember getting a very upset phone call,” the friend told The Athletic. “It was the overall disappointment of ‘I can’t believe an executive did this.’” Stewart-Binks later called her mother, according to the complaint, and the two women concluded that it would imperil her career if she spoke out about what Dixon had allegedly done.

Stewart-Binks went back to work frightened about the implications of fending off Dixon and also what his remarks about her lack of talent meant for her career going forward. At a meeting the day after the alleged assault, she said Dixon ignored her. She believed her future was “very much hanging in the balance” as she arrived in San Francisco for Super Bowl week. Her anxiety was ramped up by producers there who were hell-bent to “make a moment” that would garner attention, she said.

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“I was told … that I was not capable of being able to do a moment like this on television. And that I was not interesting, funny, talented, smart. And so I felt the need to prove that I was all in, and that I was not scared to do something like (the Gronkowski stunt). Had I not (done it), I would have felt like I failed and that I would have confirmed what (Dixon) told me.”

The reaction to her role in the Gronkowski segment surprised and stung her, she said in an interview. People she knew in the industry, some whom she considered friends, were among those voicing their disappointment with her choice to participate. Her co-worker and friend, Katie Nolan, told GQ that she disapproved of the bit. (Nolan later apologized to Stewart-Binks in a podcast and clarified her remarks.) Stewart-Binks recalled receiving a text message from Grant Wahl, the late Sports Illustrated soccer writer she admired, that read: “That’s not who you are.”

Fox promoted the Gronkowski segment on social media and elsewhere. The network got its viral moment. But when the backlash grew strong enough, Fox stopped, and the same men in the production meeting eager to “make a moment” went largely silent. Stewart-Binks’ bosses didn’t address the incident at length until six weeks later; Horowitz said at that time that he was supportive of Stewart-Binks for doing a “fun bit” and thought Gronkowski “maybe … took it a half step too far.”

In her lawsuit, Stewart-Binks said the network instructed her not to comment on the incident, and her agency, CAA, advised her to ride it out. Less than two months after the Super Bowl, Stewart-Binks was informed that Fox would not pick up her contract option with one executive telling her that there was “nothing for her to do here,” according to the complaint.


According to the complaint, Stewart-Binks was contacted by a Fox human resources official in June 2017 and asked about Horowitz’s behavior when Stewart-Binks worked at Fox Sports. Stewart-Binks didn’t have anything substantive to share about Horowitz, but the complaint states that she disclosed to the HR official what Dixon allegedly said to her in their January 2016 meeting and what allegedly happened in his hotel room afterward.

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Horowitz was fired following the probe, but Dixon remained at the company.

After Fox, Stewart-Binks worked as a part-time soccer reporter for ESPN, a rinkside reporter for NHL on TNT, a host for BetRivers Sportsbook Network, did stand-up comedy, was a host for the CBC’s 2024 Olympic coverage, among other jobs. She’s continued to scrap to find work but believes the Gronkowski segment has impacted her ability to get other jobs.

When the Faraji lawsuit against Fox and Dixon was filed, Stewart-Binks received text messages from people she had told about her interactions with Dixon. On page eight of the 42-page complaint, there is a reference to a host who reported Dixon to the company. She believed that Faraji, with whom she worked at FS1, was referencing her. Reading about what Faraji allegedly endured was a “tipping point,” Stewart-Binks said. “I didn’t want to hold onto it anymore.”

Stewart-Binks said she has experienced bouts of self-doubt since leaving Fox Sports, Dixon’s criticism of her abilities still ringing in her ears. “I had a different view of what my life would be like than what it is. And I’m very grateful for everything I have. But sometimes I think … well, what could my life have been had this not happened?”

(Top photo: Hatnim Lee for The Athletic)

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Romance Books Like ‘Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’ by Helen Fielding

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Romance Books Like ‘Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’ by Helen Fielding

Good news for fans of everyone’s favorite hapless British diarist: Bridget Jones is back.

The wearer of short skirts, smoker of endless cigarettes and romancer of the playboy Daniel Cleaver and the stealth charmer Mark Darcy takes her fourth turn on the big screen in “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.” The movie, which premieres on Peacock on Feb. 13, finds Bridget as a widowed 51-year-old mother re-entering the bizarre world of dating.

The movies are based on a best-selling book series by Helen Fielding, and there are many things to love about Bridget in both formats: the cheeky reinterpretation of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” the zany British humor, the irrepressible heroine herself. If you’ve already torn through the originals and are craving more romance books with similar vibes, we’ve got some suggestions — whichever aspect of the Jonesiverse you’re craving.

This retelling of “Emma,” set on Long Island, retains all of the original’s charming banter and complex emotions. Humaira Mirza is a matchmaker with an impressive success rate, and when it comes time to find her own perfect man, Rizwan Ali ticks all her boxes. The only problem? Her longtime family friend and verbal sparring partner Fawad Sheikh disapproves, forcing Humaira to confront her own feelings about Fawad and how well he sees her, flaws and all.

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Liza Bennett, an activist and D.J., is determined to stop the developer Dorsey Fitzgerald from building expensive condos in her Washington, D.C., neighborhood. But when Liza’s protest spawns a viral meme that turns her life upside down, the foes find themselves turning to each other. Payne gives the hallmarks of “Pride and Prejudice” a modern spin: Dorsey is a Filipino adoptee who feels like a misfit, while Liza’s family, true to the original, causes her endless embarrassment. If you want your Austen with more spice, you’ll find plenty here!

Part of the Remixed Classics series, “Most Ardently” reimagines Elizabeth Bennett as Oliver, a closeted trans man who feels trapped by the unavoidable expectation that he will become someone’s wife. While sneaking out to explore the world as a gentleman, Oliver meets Darcy — who was rude to “Elizabeth” but is kind and charming to Oliver. The more Oliver experiences the world as himself, with Darcy by his side, the more he dreams of a future defined on his own terms.

Adam Elliot is having a rough time: His family lost their vineyard to foreclosure, and the new owner is the sister of Freddy Wentworth, the only man Adam has loved. When Freddy, now a world famous chef, returns to the town he hasn’t seen since Adam broke his heart, it is inevitable that the two men’s paths will cross. This modern, queer love story includes all the yearning, grief and heart-wrenching chemistry of Austen’s “Persuasion.”

Charlotte Albright, a highbrow and bookish lesbian, met the ebullient, working-class Millie Banks at the University of Oxford. They were instant best friends — until they weren’t. Ten years later, Charlotte returns to Oxford with a prestigious job and finds that Millie, who has since realized she’s bisexual, is as fascinating as ever and wants to reconnect. In this charming slow-burn love story, the women’s friendship is as important as their romance, and the development of both is magical.

Laurie Watkinson cannot escape her terrible breakup: It’s bad enough that she and her ex work at the same law firm but according to the office rumor mill, the new girlfriend he ditched her for is pregnant. The rumor mill also reports that Jamie Carter is a Lothario whose sordid reputation has kept him from being promoted. When Laurie and Jamie get trapped in an elevator, they hatch a fauxmance plan to change the narrative. But their fake relationship quickly starts to feel very real.

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The ambitious, exacting bed-and-breakfast owner Jacob Wayne relishes his high standards, so he rejects Eve Brown, chaos personified, when she interviews to be his new chef. But after Eve accidentally breaks his arm with her car (oops), she sticks around to help. Suddenly the unpredictable, impossible Eve is taking up way too much space in Jacob’s kitchen, in his spare room and in his head, and their opposition becomes a spicy and comedic attraction.

Quinn Oxford owns Kings and Queens, the only queer bookstore in Hay-on-Wye, Wales. But his stepfather owns the building and wants to evict him. Enter Noah Sage, a romance novelist with sour memories of Wye who finds himself trapped there after a snowstorm. Quinn and Noah’s connection leads to flirting, then kissing, then more. But Noah has no interest in staying in Wye, while Quinn is an integral part of the community. It’s a simple conflict on the surface, but beneath is a cozy and emotional holiday romance.

After 52-year-old Bernadine Brown divorces her cheating husband, she uses the settlement money to buy Henry Adams, Kan. — one of the last surviving towns founded by freed slaves — in an online auction. Henry Adams has become more familiar with foreclosures than opportunities, but Bernadine brings hope to the town’s residents — especially the handsome diner owner Malachi July. This is the first novel in an 11-book series, so there’s plenty more to explore.

When Leena Cotton is forced to take a two-month sabbatical from work, she retreats to her grandmother Eileen’s cottage in rural Yorkshire. Eileen, who is approaching 80, is lonely and would like another shot at romance, but the pickings in her village are slim. So Leena proposes a swap: Eileen will relocate to London to hunt silver foxes, while Leena decompresses in the countryside. The lessons they learn about being present and celebrating life as it comes yield a delightfully sweet happily ever after.

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Erin Bennett isn’t expecting anything beyond a night of fun when she connects with a sexy stranger at an off-campus bar, where she’s avoiding her ex-husband during their daughter’s college family weekend. But at breakfast the next morning, she’s stunned when her daughter brings along her friend Cassie Klein — a charming senior, and Erin’s hookup. The women tell themselves it’s wrong, but their spicy chemistry, and deeper connection, is irresistible.

Vivian Forest, a 54-year-old social worker, agrees to tag along on a once-in-a-lifetime vacation when her daughter, Maddie, is asked to style a member of the royal family. Left to her own devices while Maddie works, Vivian meets Malcolm Hudson, a private secretary to the queen who is enchanted by Vivian, rearranging his schedule to keep spending time with her. Their flirtation progresses into a holiday fling, tempered by a pragmatic awareness of its expiration date. But despite living thousands of miles apart, Vivian and Malcolm’s quiet determination to be together makes for a perfect confection of a romance.

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Champions League: Man City have Madrid mountain to climb, are PSG better minus Mbappe?

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Champions League: Man City have Madrid mountain to climb, are PSG better minus Mbappe?

Erling Haaland scored against Real Madrid for the first time in his career.

And then scored another.

But Manchester City still lost at home to the Champions League holders.

It will have felt all too familiar for Pep Guardiola and his team as they threw away a 2-1 lead with four minutes of normal time to play at the Etihad, being stung first by one of their former players, Brahim Diaz, and then the tireless Jude Bellingham, who steered the ball home from close range in added time.

Oh, and earlier in the game Kylian Mbappe had scored with his shin.

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Carlo Ancelotti’s side take a 3-2 advantage into the playoff second leg next Wednesday at the Bernabeu, with a place in the Champions League last 16 at stake.

Elsewhere in Europe’s elite club competition, a rocket from Weston McKennie helped Juventus beat PSV, Borussia Dortmund thrashed Sporting CP in Lisbon and Ousmane Dembele continued his ludicrous start to 2025 with two goals as Paris Saint-Germain beat Brest 3-0.

Elias Burke and Seb Stafford-Bloor analyse the key moments from all the Champions League action on Tuesday night…


Typical City… and typical Madrid?

In the battle between the Champions League’s perennial comeback kings Real Madrid, and City, who have made a habit of getting pegged back this season, it should come as no surprise it ended the way it did.

GO DEEPER

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The Briefing: Man City 2 Real Madrid 3 – Bellingham’s late, late winner and another City collapse

After an exceptional assist for Mbappe’s goal, Dani Ceballos went from hero to villain 20 minutes later, tripping Phil Foden just inside the box in the 80th minute. Haaland tucked away the resulting penalty, his 49th goal in 48 Champions League games.

Fortunately for Ceballos, two errors in quick succession from Ederson allowed Diaz, who has a Premier League medal with City from their centurion 2017-18 season, to level the scores at 2-2.

Then, after Vinicius Junior went through and lifted a shot/pass over Ederson’s head, Bellingham gambled to tap in a stoppage-time winner from close range to put Madrid 3-2 up ahead of the second leg in Spain.

For City, it was yet another disastrous late collapse after the Feyenoord and PSG debacles in the league phase. Now, they have given themselves a mountain to climb in overturning the deficit at the hardest place to win at in the Champions League.

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Are PSG actually better without Mbappe?

Few would have expected PSG to improve when Mbappe left for Real Madrid last summer. But, judging from their comfortable 3-0 win against Brest and impressive form in 2025, coach Luis Enrique appears to have found a harmony in Paris that he struggled to create when the France superstar was leading the line.

As it’s transpired, Ousmane Dembele, 27, once considered a talent so promising that Barcelona paid a fee rising to £135 million, reported by BBC, to sign him as a 20-year-old from Borussia Dortmund in 2017, has more than filled his shoes after an inspired tactical switch from the coach.

Since Enrique brought Dembele into the central striker role from the wings, the position he has fulfilled since emerging as a talented youngster, his goalscoring production has exploded — and his two goals against Brest were another example. His first demonstrated his confidence, dribbling into the box before whipping a left-footed effort into the near post. His second, a deflected finish with his right foot after reacting quicker to a loose ball than the Brest defenders, highlighted his anticipation as a goalscorer. Scoring with both feet is not an unfamiliar feat for Dembele, who famously does not know which is his stronger foot.

It was his third brace of the year to go along with two hat-tricks and 15 goals in total — already more than his entire tally in 2024. This switch has given PSG a fresh attacking verve and resulted in a more balanced unit.

Who knows, it might be enough to push the French champions from a side that was teetering above the elimination zone for much of the league phase to contenders for the trophy.


USMNT midfielder McKennie sprinkles some magic for Juventus

McKennie dedicated his celebration to Harry Potter but it was his wand of a right boot that provided the magic as he opened the scoring for Juventus against PSV.

With the USMNT midfielder lurking on the edge of PSV’s box, the ball broke in his direction, bouncing at a good height to strike. McKennie, who is no stranger to scoring spectacular goals, approached the ball at an angle, allowing him to shift his body weight to the left to get over the shot and control his effort while striking through it.

The result was an unstoppable blend of control and power. His shot flew past Walter Benitez in the PSV net, inches below the crossbar. It’s probably a good thing the ball missed him, too, as it would have taken him with it into the back of the net if he was in the way.

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McKennie, who is a huge Harry Potter fan, celebrated with an imitation of the “Expelliarmus” spell from the film and book franchise. He has a lightning bolt tattooed on his finger in tribute to the speedy Gryffindor seeker, and in 2023 he was pictured alongside Matthew Lewis, who plays Neville Longbottom in the films, posing with a USMNT shirt alongside Brenden Aaronson.

In December, club and national team-mate Timothy Weah joined in on the fun, celebrating together with the “Expelliarmus” after McKennie scored against City.


Rooney and Mbappe: masters of the shinned volley against Man City

Wayne Rooney’s brilliant overhead kick in Manchester United’s 2-1 win over City in 2011 will take some beating as the greatest shinned goal ever scored against City (and perhaps anyone), but Kylian Mbappe surely claimed the silver medal with his goal in the second half for Madrid.

Dani Ceballos, who was playing in his first Champions League knockout match for Real Madrid seven-and-a-half years after signing from Real Betis, played a perfectly weighted lofted pass in the danger area between City’s goalkeeper and defence, which Mbappe latched onto.

With an astoundingly similar technique to his second goal against Argentina in the 2022 World Cup final, Mbappe leapt and volleyed across the ball with his right foot while falling away to the left.

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While his effort in Qatar flew past Emi Martinez, the connection wasn’t so pure in this instance, the ball looping off his shin, over Ederson, and into the corner. 

Rooney, watching from pitchside at the Etihad while working for Amazon Prime, must surely have been impressed.


Why did it take four minutes to award Haaland’s first goal?

Premier League fans are now accustomed to seeing footage of VAR officials in Stockley Park drawing lines to determine whether a player was offside, but things operate differently in the Champions League — and Manchester City fans found out the hard way.

The Etihad Stadium erupted after Haaland put the home side ahead with a left-footed finish from close range after Josko Gvardiol played a chested pass in his direction. Three minutes and 50 seconds later, another cheer went up around the stadium as the Champions League’s semi-automated offside technology confirmed the goal.

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Gvardiol was visibly onside when the initial cross was played towards him, but he, and Haaland, had moved beyond the Madrid defence by the time the Croatian made contact. As long as Haaland was in line with or behind Gvardiol, he’d have been onside, but, as evidenced by the time it took for the technology to confirm, it was very tight.

As the name suggests, the technology eliminates the potential for human error, with the offside pictures taken from cameras in real time. It debuted in the Champions League in 2022-23 and was used at the 2022 World Cup. According to the Premier League, which has plans to bring in this technology this season, offside check delays should be reduced by 31 seconds.

In this case, however, the check took so long that Alan Shearer intimated the wait may have had some relation to Jack Grealish being replaced due to a non-impact injury 10 minutes later.

“It certainly doesn’t help when you’ve got elite athletes standing around for almost four minutes,” Shearer said on co-commentary during Amazon Prime’s UK coverage of the match. “It cannot help you, or your body. It’s not acceptable that players are having to wait around for that long.”

Judging by this incident those marginal calls will continue to take time. At least we got the right decision, eh?

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Who exactly is Serhou Guirassy? 

The Champions League has an unlikely top-scorer this season: Borussia Dortmund’s 28-year-old Guinean Serhou Guirassy. His tenth goal of the competition might have been his best; it was certainly the most important. An authoritative header that looped up and into the far corner, it settled a Dortmund team who, for much of the first half in Portugal, had had to withstand pressure.

That was vital, because Dortmund have endured a torrid season and are naturally fragile. They sit a distant 11th in the Bundesliga and are now coached by Niko Kovac, who was appointed to replaced the sacked Nuri Sahin two weeks ago.

This was Kovac’s first win. More importantly, it was a result (and performance) that Dortmund will feel they can build on in coming weeks — and that sense of a first step taken owes much to Guirassy.

He was signed from Stuttgart in the summer of 2024 after scoring 28 Bundesliga goals from 28 appearances last season. It was the first truly prolific top-flight season of his career, but at times the season he has laboured at the head of a team who do not create nearly enough chances. He can snatch at opportunities and drift out of games. So, while nine goals from 18 league appearances is hardly bad, it’s not quite what it could have been.

But Guirassy is an elegant, technical footballer rather than just a goalscorer. There were times in the first half when his languid skill on the ball seemed to reassure team-mates clearly short on confidence. And, having scored the goal which changed the entire complexion of the game — truly, an exemplary header — he created the second with a perfect cross for Pascal Gross, who kneed the ball in at the back-post to give Dortmund a 2-0 advantage on the night.

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Even before Karim Adeyemi had scored a third from a flowing counter attack to effectively finish the tie as a contest, Dortmund had started to play with a confidence and security that they have lacked for many months. Guirassy alone did not provide that. By full-time, this had become a commendable team performance. But goals so often change a side’s mood and that could not have been more the case for Kovac’s BVB than it was on Tuesday night.

There were plenty of individual contributions to that, but they followed Guirassy’s lead.

Seb Stafford-Bloor

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What happens next?

Champions League playoffs

Tuesday’s results

Brest 0 Paris Saint-Germain 3
Juventus 2 PSV Eindhoven 1
Manchester City 2 Real Madrid 3
Sporting CP 0 Borussia Dortmund 3

Wednesday’s fixtures
(8pm BST, 3pm ET unless stated)

Club Bruges v Atalanta (5.45pm BST, 12.45pm ET)
Celtic v Bayern Munich
Feyenoord v Milan
Monaco v Benfica

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The second legs will be played on February 18/19.

Eight teams will advance to the last 16, to join Liverpool, Barcelona, Arsenal, Inter, Atletico Madrid, Bayer Leverkusen, Lille and Aston Villa.

The draw for the last 16, quarter-final and semi-final will take place on Friday February 21.

(Top photo: Carl Recine/Getty Images) 

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Maria Teresa Horta, the Last of Portugal’s ‘Three Marias,’ Dies at 87

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Maria Teresa Horta, the Last of Portugal’s ‘Three Marias,’ Dies at 87

Maria Teresa Horta, a Portuguese feminist writer who helped shatter her conservative country’s strictures on women, died on Feb. 4 at her home in Lisbon. She was 87.

Her death was announced on Facebook by her publisher, Dom Quixote. The Portuguese prime minister, Luis Montenegro, paid tribute to her on X, calling her “an important example of freedom and the struggle to recognize the place of women.”

Ms. Horta was the last surviving member of the celebrated writers known as the “Three Marias,” who together wrote the landmark 1972 book “Novas Cartas Portuguesas” (“New Portuguese Letters”). A collection of letters the women wrote to one another about their problems as women in Portugal, it opened up a world of repressed female sexuality, infuriated the country’s ham-fisted dictatorship and led to their arrest and criminal prosecution on charges of indecency and abuse of freedom of the press.

“To feminists around the world, as well as to champions of a free press, the police action against the Portuguese women in June 1972 was an outrage that slowly became the focus of an international protest movement,” Time magazine wrote in July 1973.

The Three Marias — Ms. Horta, Maria Isabel Barreno (1939-2016) and Maria Velho da Costa (1938-2020) — became international feminist folk heroes, and the book’s fame alerted the world to repression under the Portuguese dictatorship. Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras and Adrienne Rich were among the writers who declared their public support. The National Organization for Women voted to make the case its first international feminist cause.

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The case was not Ms. Horta’s first brush with controversy.

In 1967 she had been “beaten in the street” after the publication of her breakthrough volume of poetry, “Minha Senhora de Mim” (“My Lady of Me”), she told her biographer Patrícia Reis in 2019. That book “challenged something deeply rooted in this country,” she said: “the silencing of female sexuality.”

Frequent knocks on the door by the Portuguese secret police became part of her life.

The themes of her work grew from what she characterized as a dual oppression: being a woman in Portugal’s male-dominated society and growing up in a police state.

“I was born in a fascist country, a country that stole liberty, a country of cruelty, prisons, torture,” she told an Italian interviewer in 2018. “And I understood very early on that I couldn’t stand for this.”

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She also wouldn’t stand for the oppression of women in Portugal’s traditional macho culture. “Women are beaten or raped just as much by a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, whoever, as by a worker, a peasant and so on,” she told the Lisbon daily Diário de Notícias in 2017. “Women have always been beaten and have always been raped. People do not consider the violence that goes on in bed, in the sexual act with their husband.”

In 1971, these preoccupations inspired Ms. Horta to start meeting every week with two friends and fellow authors, Ms. Barreno and Ms. da Costa, to share written reflections on the common themes that troubled them.

They were inspired by a classic work from the 17th century, “Letters of a Portuguese Nun,” supposedly written by a young woman shut up in a Portuguese convent to the French cavalry officer who had abandoned her. Scholars now believe the work was fiction, but its powerful expression of pent-up longing and frustration resonated with the three Marias.

Like the nun in the book, they used letters to one another, as well as poems, to express their unhappiness as women in their early 30s, educated by nuns, married and with children, in a Lisbon stifling under a 35-year dictatorship, rigid Catholicism and ill-judged colonial wars in Africa.

When they published the writings as “New Portuguese Letters,” they vowed never to reveal to outsiders, much less the police, who had written what.

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“Their views and natures were far apart,” Neal Ascherson wrote in The New York Review of Books in a review of the 1975 English translation, titled “The Three Marias.” “Maria Isabel the coolest, Maria Teresa the gaudiest personality, Maria Fátima the one who swerved away from pure feminism toward social and psychological analyses of a whole people’s oppression.”

The strange hybrid — Mr. Ascherson called it “a huge and complicated garland” — is suffused with repressed rage at the condition the women find themselves in.

“They wanted the three of us to sit in parlors, patiently embroidering our days with the many silences, the many soft words and gestures that custom dictates,” one of the letters says. “But whether it be here or in Beja, we have refused to be cloistered, we are quietly, or brazenly, stripping ourselves of our habits all of a sudden.”

Another letter says, “We have also won the right to choose vengeance, since vengeance is part of love, and love is a right long since granted us in practice: practicing love with our thighs, our long legs that expertly fulfill the exercise expected of them.”

Although Mr. Ascherson found the book “often maddeningly imprecise, self-indulgent and flatulent,” he said that “where it is precise, the book still bites” and “where it is erotic, it is neither exhibitionist nor coy but well calculated to touch the mind through emotion.”

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A few Portuguese reviewers welcomed it as “brave, daring and violent,” as the author Nuno de Sampayo put it in the Lisbon newspaper A Capital. They predicted a difficult reception.

Prime Minister Marcello Caetano attempted to put the authors in jail, calling them “women who shame the country, who are unpatriotic.”

On May 25, 1972, the state press censor banned the book. The next day it was sent to the criminal police department in Lisbon. When the authors’ trial opened in 1973, the crowd was so great that the judge ordered the courtroom cleared.

In May 1974, nearly two years after their arrests and two weeks after the Portuguese dictatorship was overthrown, the Three Marias were acquitted.

Judge Artur Lopes Cardoso, who had been overseeing the case, became a sudden convert, declaring the book “neither pornographic nor immoral.” “On the contrary,” he said, “it is a work of art of high level, following other works of art produced by the same authors.”

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Maria Teresa de Mascarenhas Horta Barros was born in Lisbon on May 20, 1937, the daughter of Jorge Augusto da Silva Horta, a prominent doctor and a conservative who supported the dictatorship, and Carlota Maria Mascarenhas. Her paternal grandmother had been prominent in the Portuguese suffragist movement.

Maria attended Filipa de Lencastre High School, graduated from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Lisbon, and published her first book of poetry at 23. She would go on to write nearly 30 more, as well as 10 novels.

She was also a critic and reporter for several newspapers and the literary editor of A Capital.

In the 1980s, she edited the feminist magazine Mulheres, which was linked to the Portuguese Communist Party. (She was a member of the party from 1975 to 1989.)

No matter the genre — poetry, fiction or journalism — she considered writing a public duty.

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“The obligation of a poet is not to be in an ivory tower; it is not to be isolated but to be among people,” she told the online magazine Guernica in 2014. “As a journalist, I never isolated myself. I was a journalist at a daily newspaper and every day I went out on the street. Every day I had contact with people.”

She won most of her country’s top literary prizes, but she caused a stir in 2012 when she refused to accept the D. Dinis Award because she objected to the government’s right-leaning politics.

She is survived by her son, Luis Jorge Horta de Barros, and two grandsons. Her husband, the journalist Luis de Barros, a former editor of the newspaper O Diário, died in 2019.

“People ask me why I am a feminist,” Ms. Horta told Guernica in 2014. “Because I am a woman of freedom and equality and it is not possible to have freedom in the world when half of humanity has no rights.”

Kirsten Noyes and Daphné Anglès contributed research.

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