For women who work as sports reporters, #MeToo is not just a movement, it is often their everyday reality.
In just the past two weeks, two women were harassed while reporting at the World Cup in Russia, the episodes captured in widely viewed videos.
One of the women, Julia Guimarães, a reporter with TV Globo and SporTV in Brazil, was speaking on camera in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on Sunday when a man tried to kiss her on the cheek. In the video, Guimarães can be seen quickly dodging the man’s puckered lips.
“Don’t do this!” she told him. “Never do this again, OK?”
“I’m sorry,” the man can be heard saying in the background.
The second woman, Julieth González Therán, who works for the Spanish language division of the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, was approached by a man this month while broadcasting live from Moscow.
Video of the episode, which was posted online by Deutsche Welle, shows González Therán speaking in front of the camera when a man places his hand on her chest and kisses her cheek. During the episode she continued reporting as if nothing had happened.
Afterward, on Twitter, she addressed it.
“The violent act of a fan is sad,” she wrote, but what is even worse, she added, is the reaction of those who do not see it as harassment.
Deutsche Welle also condemned the man’s actions, saying on Twitter: “Sexual harassment is not OK. It needs to stop. In football, and elsewhere.”
Even amid the rising awareness of sexual assault and harassment in all its permutations, these episodes illustrate how women are forced not only to defend themselves while on the job, but also to do the work of explaining what types of behaviour are considered unacceptable.
Women working in sports journalism are subject to “horrible abuse,” Suzanne Franks, who leads the journalism department at City University of London, said Tuesday.
That abuse can come in many forms: angry tweets, verbal confrontations, groping. One of the most egregious examples was that of sports reporter Erin Andrews, who was secretly videotaped naked by a stalker in a hotel room in 2008. She was awarded $55 million in a lawsuit, a case that shone a spotlight on the rampant harassment faced by women in her field.
Franks has spent years researching the barriers women encounter in sports journalism, both when trying to enter the field and while working.
“In the sports area there is still such a sexist strain,” Franks said. “It hasn’t woken up to all of the advances women have made over the years.”
The man who grabbed González Therán eventually came forward to apologize, saying his actions stemmed from a bet he made with a friend “that I could kiss a reporter on the cheek on the air” and in the process, he said, he accidentally touched González Therán’s chest with his left hand.
“I acted carelessly and did not think that I would cause you confusion and shock,” he told her via Skype in a conversation between the two that was posted online. “I know that your job is very hard and I hope that you will never face another such incident in your career.”
Deutsche Welle did not publish his name.
González Therán accepted his apology.
“I refuse to be a victim,” she told him. “I just want to continue with my job, reporting about football — about the joy and emotions of this great event.”
FIFA and the World Cup Russia Local Organizing Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did the two reporters.
Elizabeth Willis Frogge, an associate professor of broadcast journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism who co-founded the school’s student chapter for the Association for Women in Sports Media, recently attended the association’s annual convention, where sexual harassment was the subject of a panel discussion.
“Things are gradually changing, but it’s still not where it needs to be,” she said.
Broadcast journalism students at Missouri report live for KOMU, the university-owned NBC affiliate in Columbia, Missouri, and cover both collegiate and professional sporting events.
“What I tell students is to minimize the potential harm,” Frogge said. “A lot of times reporters go out on live shots by themselves. But if it’s a location or a place where they don’t feel comfortable, by all means it’s going to be better if you have a second person who can be a second pair of eyes for you.”
Additionally, female sports journalists are especially vulnerable to criticism, she said, in part because of an assumption that women do not know as much about sports as men.
Having thick skin is important, Frogge said. And not just out on the job. Online harassment is also especially prevalent.
In 2016, the sports reporters Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro shared several of the abusive tweets they have received in a YouTube video produced by Just Not Sports that has been viewed nearly 4.5 million times. In the video, men who had never before seen the Twitter comments read them out loud to Spain and DiCaro.
“You need to be hit in the head with a hockey puck and killed” one tweet said. “Hopefully, this skank Julie DiCaro is Bill Cosby’s next victim,” said another.
Spain said at the time, “It’s not just, like, ‘You’re an idiot, and I’m mad at you for your opinion.’ It’s: ‘I hate you because you are in a space that I don’t want you in. I come to sports to get away from women. Why don’t you take your top off and just make me lunch?’”
Franks said the women in the field with whom she had spoken in Britain were determined to persist because they loved sports, despite the fact that, for many female sports reporters, “everything they say is sort of picked to pieces and they’re treated in a much more derogatory way.”
And that persistence, she said, is what they want to impart to the next generation: “They were trying to get the message out to younger women that you should just stick at it and you shouldn’t be put off.”
