According to a lawsuit, ESPN NFL analyst Ryan Clark flat out refused to work with Sage Steele because she dared to question ESPN’s radical coronavirus policies.
Steele filed her lawsuit against ESPN and parent company Disney alleging that Clark refused to appear on SportsCenter unless the network replaced Steele with another host. And when ESPN refused Clark’s demands, he simply refused to go on the show as assigned.
Clark “suffered no penalty from ESPN as a result,” Outkick reported.
Steele’s suit adds that ESPN’s Nicole Briscoe once tweeted “Amen” to a tweet that hoped ESPN would fire Steele.
As Outick noted, Briscoe went even farther with her tweet and dared ESPN to punish her for attacking a fellow female worker when she wrote, “Amen. (Even if it gets me in trouble.) Amen.”
Steele became a target in September of last year when she spoke out against Disney’s “sick” vaccine mandates that she called “scary.”
During an interview on the Uncut with Jay Cutler podcast, Steele spoke of getting vaccinated despite her desire to avoid it because she feared that ESPN would fire her if she didn’t.
“I work for a company that mandates it and I had until September 30th to get it done or I’m out,” Steele told Cutler.
“I respect everyone’s decision, I really do, but to mandate it is sick and it’s scary to me in many ways,” Steele continued. “I just, I’m not surprised it got to this point, especially with Disney, I mean a global company like that.”
In the same podcast, Steele criticized Barack Obama for choosing to be called black despite the fact his father was out of the picture, and also took a shot at the #MeToo movement.
Her comments created enough of a firestorm that she later apologized for creating a controversy inside ESPN among employees who were upset at her.
Steele has been a target of attack by various and sundry members of ESPN from its management to its on-air personalities to its “journalists” over her opinions that sometimes skew toward right and away from the woke, left-wing, social justice-pushing intelligentsia running the network.
But Steele alleges in her lawsuit that the network has perpetrated selective enforcement of its comportment rules by constantly attacking her while looking the other way when fellow employees attack her.
In a statement about the lawsuit, ESPN said that “Sage remains a valued contributor on some of ESPN’s highest profile content, including the recent Masters telecasts and anchoring our noon SportsCenter. As a point of fact, she was never suspended.”
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