Barstool Sports Founder Dave Portnoy Calls Sex Allegations a ‘Hit Piece’

Posted on: November 4, 2021, 03:26h. 

Last updated on: November 4, 2021, 04:41h.

Ed Silverstein @casinoorgedsilv Read More
Expertise: Legal, Tribal Gaming.

Several unnamed women are claiming disturbing allegations in recent sexual encounters with Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy. Details appear in an extended expose published in Insider. 

He said no charges were ever filed against him
Dave Portnoy, pictured above. The founder of Barstool Sports denied any wrongdoing after an article appeared alleging disturbing sexual encounters with women. (Image: The Independent)

Portnoy responded by denying any wrongdoing. He said no charges were ever filed against him.

But the article led shares of Penn National Gaming to fall more than 20 percent Thursday, Variety reported. Penn Gaming has a 36 percent share in Barstool.

The most explicit allegation took place in the summer of last year. A 20-year-old college student initiated a relationship with Portnoy. She reached out to him online. He then sent her videos of other women with whom he had sex, the report said.

He wanted to hear her sexual fantasies, too. One of the ones she shared was a “rape” fantasy, where “I don’t have any control of what’s going on,” she told the publication.

He then purchased an airline ticket for her to visit him at his Nantucket, Mass. home.

The two kissed soon after she arrived. A short time later, she was giving him oral sex, the report claimed. He filmed it with a cell phone. But never asked her it if was OK for him to videotape the encounter, the report adds.

Human Sex Doll

“I was scared. He was just so mean,” the young woman told Insider. “I felt like I was just a human sex doll.

It was so rough I felt like I was being raped he video taped me and spit in my mouth and choked me so hard I couldn’t breathe,” she added in messages quoted by the publication.

“And it hurt and I was literally screaming in pain,” she added. “I kept trying to get away and he was like, ‘Stop running away from me. Stop running away from me.'”

But Portnoy, she said, “just went harder.” The two did not have sex again after that first experience. She then slept on a couch. Two days later, the woman, whom the publication gave the pseudonym of Madison, flew home.

Another Woman Comes Forward

Another allegation came last July, when Allison, 19, also a pseudonym, was at her family’s home on Nantucket. Allison told Portnoy via email she wanted to meet him.

He invited her over. The two had sex, the report said. He allegedly choked her, too.

​​”He kept spitting in my mouth, which was really gross,” Allison recalled in her interview. “I was kind of scared. I didn’t want to disappoint him…. I just felt very preyed on.”

Three nights after the sexual encounter, Allison was suicidal, the report said. She had to be hospitalized for emotional illness.

Concerned, Allison’s mother called the Nantucket Police Department.

“Go put somebody outside his door because you’re going to see every day there’s some young girl being dropped off,” she told police.

Portnoy Responds via Twitter

Portnoy called the mother’s allegations “totally false.”

An unnamed attorney for Barstool Sports told the publication that many allegations in the article “embody half-truths are highly misleading, lack appropriate context, and appear to have been provided to you by individuals whose motivations and trustworthiness should at least have been fully vetted.”

On Thursday, Portnoy responded to the article via Twitter. He called the article a “hit piece” that the publication dug up over eight months.

I’ve never done anything weird with a girl, ever, never anything remotely non-consensual,” Portney said in his Twitter video.

He said the allegations paint him as a “sexual deviant. Serious s**t” and are “jarring.”

“This reporter had an agenda from Day One,” Portnoy added. He suggested the current climate against him means the “woke cancel culture wants to cancel me. This is the next escalation.”

In a statement, a Barstool Sports representative told Variety, “This recent news does not involve any workplace behavior. As a matter of policy, we do not comment on the private lives of our employees, but we take this matter seriously and are monitoring it closely.”

Fearful of Retaliation

Some of the women feared retaliation if it was discovered they were speaking out about Portnoy, Insider reported.

In the past, Portnoy has made at least one rape joke, as well as made comments that were considered racist and sexist, Variety reported.