All-American Grift: We Investigated Trump's Favorite Sports Troll

Speaker 1 So the reason you're hearing and seeing me right now is because we have a bit of incredible news to share.

Speaker 1 Our show, Pablo Torre finds out, was not only named one of the best of 2025 by Apple Podcasts, but our episode, The Silent Superstar and the Rotten Apple Tree, which was, you know, the whole investigation and aspiration and Kawhi Leonard and the Clippers, was also chosen as one of Apple Podcasts' best episodes of the year.

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Speaker 1 Thank you for making clear what Apple Time, Apple Time actually means. And today,

Speaker 1 you are going to find out what this sound is.

Speaker 2 Where's our beautiful great swimmer, Gaines? Where's Gaines? Look at, come up here. Will you please come up here?

Speaker 3 Come up, come up, come up.

Speaker 2 This is a great champion.

Speaker 2 And she was beating everybody. And then one day she looked over and said, that's the largest human being I've ever seen.

Speaker 1 Right after this ad.

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Speaker 8 This is really cool. I've never done anything like this before.
I've never done a podcast before. So God, well, okay.

Speaker 8 Apologies in advance.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, no. So I want to explain for our audience here.
Let's just get into it. I want to explain for our audience here that you, Madison, are joining us from where?

Speaker 8 I'm in San Francisco. I'm in the Center for Investigative Reporting offices.

Speaker 1 The Center for Investigative Reporting is, of course, the parent company of Mother Jones, which is one of the most venerable journalistic institutions in America, has been that way for decades upon decades upon decades.

Speaker 1 And it's really cool to partner with you guys on a story that I have been trying to fit into our strange docket because I think that this investigation that you did for us is the thing that has been lurking underneath the surface of like the most explosive topic in sports and politics for what four years four quite consequential years at the very least at this point yeah even even more 2020 I think is when this all started and it has been a wild ride and I'm excited to dig into this part of it yeah so this is if nothing else a profile it's a profile of I think what might be the main character of this movement that has dominated American politics.

Speaker 1 So who is the face of this movement, Madison?

Speaker 8 Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.

Speaker 8 The poster child, the it girl, the Regina George of this movement is the 24-year-old who clapped longer than anyone else at a White House ceremony in February during Hail to the Chief as Trump walked in.

Speaker 8 Riley Gaines.

Speaker 1 Right there, like off to the right of just the center of the frame in a resplendent white outfit is Riley Gates.

Speaker 8 She's got her real MAGA look going.

Speaker 8 She's got the full face of makeup, long, wavy blonde hair, and she's really become so recognizable over the last three years, at least if you're in the Fox News audience.

Speaker 23 Thank you very much.

Speaker 2 This is a nice crowd, isn't it, huh?

Speaker 2 You've been waiting a long time for this.

Speaker 2 So have I. Actually, it was so ridiculous.
But here we are.

Speaker 8 So this is Donald Trump preparing to sign his executive order

Speaker 8 keeping men out of women's sports, a threat to defund schools that let

Speaker 8 trans girls play on the girls' team.

Speaker 1 Which means that the girls who are assembled there in the front row, wearing their uniforms and their medals, these are the people that Donald Trump and Riley Gaines are saving.

Speaker 1 They're protecting them, these victims of the trans movement.

Speaker 8 Right. Donald Trump is here to protect women is the really clear message of this photo op.

Speaker 1 And for people who don't know what Riley Gaines' lore is, her origin story, Donald Trump is very helpfully here to fill us in on the injustice that Riley Gaines suffered when she was a college swimmer.

Speaker 2 The flag forced her to share a spot on the podium with a male swimmer who took her trophy while the media celebrated this stolen glory.

Speaker 2 And Riley is just a tremendous athlete, and it was a very unfair situation. I watched it.
A lot of people watched it. It was ridiculous, frankly.
But I want to thank Riley.

Speaker 2 She really has been in the forefront. People that aren't that well-versed in this would say that she was the leader.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 great job, Riley. Thank you very much.

Speaker 25 Appreciate it.

Speaker 1 Riley Gaines, you may also recall from the time that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dunked on her because of the whole thing where she, you know, actually just finished in fifth, Madison.

Speaker 8 Yeah, she came in fifth. And in defensive Riley games here, coming in fifth in the NCAA Division I National Women's Swimming Championship is a big deal if you're a college woman swimmer.

Speaker 8 It's the top meeting. So people love to call her mediocre, make fun of her for coming in fifth, troll her, troll the troll, but it is a big deal to have to have swum this meet.

Speaker 8 And she famously, very famously, tied for fifth with one Leah Thomas.

Speaker 1 And we can go back and forth, of course, about the competitive advantage debate and the question, the science therein. We've done episodes on that on this show.

Speaker 1 But the larger argument that that platform, that literal platform became politically was

Speaker 1 even more dire,

Speaker 1 right?

Speaker 1 I mean, the claim that Riley Gaines goes on to make, that this room, that this president goes on to make, is that female athletes are not only losing to the Leah Thomases of the world the trans athlete they're being victimized

Speaker 26 what do you make of all these transgender athletes men invading women's sports trans invading sport trans infiltration of women's sports put women in actual danger trans women movement is actually anti-woman 100 especially when when it comes to sports 100

Speaker 8 absolutely you hear all the time the idea that trans women are quote unquote invading invading women's spaces and putting them at risk. It's been incredibly effective as far as changing policy.

Speaker 8 There are,

Speaker 8 the last time I checked, 29 states that have gone ahead and banned trans women and trans girls from women's athletics. That's huge.

Speaker 8 That's obviously more than half the country after this executive order that we just watched. We have the NCAA banning trans athletes, trans women specifically.
We have the U.S.

Speaker 8 Olympic and Paralympic Committee doing the same thing. It's really been a massive win for Riley Gaines and her allies on the policy side.

Speaker 8 And as far as public opinion goes, obviously the Republican Party has really banked on this issue to win elections and poured money into anti-trans advertising a lot of it about sports.

Speaker 1 But funny enough, like the thing that I want to do here, though, is actually introduce people to Riley Gaines.

Speaker 1 I actually want them to understand the story that she doesn't quite want to tell, but we had you investigate.

Speaker 8 I mean, the cast of characters we are going to encounter today involves Simone Biles, the Philadelphia Eagles, the Orlando Magic, and Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 1 Also,

Speaker 1 I have been promised spreadsheets, Madison. I've been promised tax forms.

Speaker 8 There are a lot of spreadsheets and a lot of tax forms.

Speaker 1 Get ready. This is my kind of episode.

Speaker 1 So this is also one of those episodes where I end up listening to an audiobook. And I do need to now share a bit of what I learned while listening to Swimming Against the Current by Riley Gaines.

Speaker 8 Swimming Against the Current is about standing up for reality, facts, and common sense.

Speaker 8 It's my story of how I became a passionate advocate, not only for myself as a collegiate athlete, but for every woman whose future is at risk of being jeopardized.

Speaker 8 One of the two dozen people I talked to for this calls sports a gateway drug to the anti-trans movement.

Speaker 8 People start getting interested and getting hooked thinking about some of the real and legitimate questions about the science of trans athletes.

Speaker 8 But as part of digging into that, they get sucked into this online sphere and this rhetoric that this is about sports to immediately, every woman's future is at risk from transgender women.

Speaker 8 That slide, that pivot, that's what really is Riley's essence or the essence of her message.

Speaker 1 I often think of like politics now as just like a storytelling contest.

Speaker 1 And so when I hear the story that Riley Gaines is telling in this book, it reminds me that the most helpful thing often when it comes to a movement like this is to find a victim to empathize with.

Speaker 1 And here you have a young girl born in Nashville, Tennessee in the year 2000.

Speaker 8 And I tried it all. Softball, basketball, horseback riding, track.
There wasn't a sport I didn't beg my parents to put me in. I was four years old when I started swimming.
It was

Speaker 1 a typical summer.

Speaker 8 She's the daughter of a former football player at Vanderbilt University who went on to play professionally in the NFL and who had multiple brothers who were also SEC athletes and NFL superstars.

Speaker 8 Brad Gaines is currently running for Congress, so I have to say something about this NFL superstar line.

Speaker 8 This article, which is from the Philadelphia Inquirer sports columnist Phil Sheridan, to make room on the roster, the Eagles waved fullback Brad Brad Gaines. He was in his first NFL camp at 28.

Speaker 1 Look, when I eventually write my autobiography, my memoirs, I too might turn my parents into superstar athletes.

Speaker 1 I do know that Riley Gaines herself, though, was like a seven-time state champion swimmer in high school, right? Like she was legit. This is a legitimate prospect.

Speaker 8 Yeah, she was good. She qualified for the Olympic trials at 15.

Speaker 1 There's a part of chapter one of the book also where she talks about how she winds winds up at the University of Kentucky, where a lot of her lore took place.

Speaker 1 And in 2016, she found herself with this decision to make.

Speaker 8 It was time to choose a college where I could continue excelling in my athletic career.

Speaker 1 And what she describes is this very fond memory of being almost relentlessly recruited by the head swimming coach at the University of Kentucky, who sold Riley Gaines at one point on attending a Kentucky basketball game.

Speaker 8 Don't judge. This was when Kentucky men's basketball was actually good and not losing to St.
Peter's Peacocks.

Speaker 8 Never in a million years did I think I'd actually fall in love with the school, which, of course, I did.

Speaker 8 And that annoying coach who kept calling and emailing me, he became and still is one of my best friends.

Speaker 1 The coach that became one of her best friends, as she calls him, the relentless swimming coach that recruited her, what was his name?

Speaker 8 That coach was Lars Jorgensen.

Speaker 8 Riley calls him Coach Lars, so we can call him that too. He was a former college swimmer.
He made it to the Olympics in 1988, came back coach D1 in Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee.

Speaker 8 And by the time Riley got to Kentucky in 2018 or freshman year, he'd been head coach of the Wildcats there for four years. And they were doing great under him.
They were, by all accounts, on the rise.

Speaker 8 In the beginning of freshman year, he continually addressed me as a loft.

Speaker 8 I had no idea what this meant, and I never questioned it until one day I mustered up the courage to ask. I was told it means lack of effing talent.

Speaker 3 Ah, cool.

Speaker 8 Thanks. We don't just have to take Riley's word for it that this was how Coach Lars operated.
I talked to three of her former teammates at Kentucky.

Speaker 8 Two of them who spoke on condition of anonymity because they know that Riley's fans and followers might go after people. But one of them agreed to go on on the record.

Speaker 23 My name is Trinity Ward. I swam at University of Kentucky from 2019 to 2022.

Speaker 1 And also she was brave enough to speak to us on camera.

Speaker 8 Trinity started at UK a year after Riley did. And by the time she's getting recruited at UK, she's seeing its intense training program.

Speaker 8 She's seeing all the resources that the school puts into the program.

Speaker 23 It was really pitched as, and rightfully so, this program where, you know, you almost could have this rags to riches story of somebody that came in as a decent swimmer.

Speaker 23 And all of a sudden, after going through this training program, dropping, you know, 10 to 20 seconds sometimes.

Speaker 23 and really just improving a lot and becoming an all-star, making the all-American team, becoming an SECA finalist, qualifying for NCAAs, meddling and finaling at NCAAs,

Speaker 23 which was really inspiring to me. But every person I'm talking to back home, outside of sitting at my school, is like, you're living the dream.
You know, you're living like the American dream.

Speaker 8 She became a specialist in the 100-meter butterfly, and this is what she trains for. And as she's really getting started, she says that Coach Lars reminded her of the coach from Rocky.

Speaker 1 Right. This is the guy who says, you're going to eat light and you're going to grab thunder.
And you're going to grab thunder.

Speaker 8 You're going to become a shit talker.

Speaker 1 So now we're getting into 2020 and Riley Gaines, again, is on the team at the same time. She's a year older than Trinity Ward.
And it sounds like things start escalating.

Speaker 8 As Trinity started spending more time on this team, she said that the Women's Swim program revealed what she called some darker sides.

Speaker 23 There definitely were some darker sides to that, like,

Speaker 23 you know, doing that pushing

Speaker 23 in an intense way that was not

Speaker 23 productive, like full-on, you know, yelling at somebody where it was like, hey, like, now that.

Speaker 8 What Trinity and her two teammates all described to me was a culture set by Coach Lars at the top that went beyond talking, beyond mercurial.

Speaker 8 The way these three swimmers talked about it, and all of them were on the team at the same time as Riley Gaines. It was a place where they felt like their confidence was destroyed.

Speaker 23 And like seeing someone cry or just

Speaker 23 become very upset or just say like, oh, I feel so worthless, that's really tough to see.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 8 they talked about how if they didn't do well at a meet, they would be punished. They would have to do punishment swims.

Speaker 23 Like all the coaches left the pool deck and we were told to just swim and don't stop for two hours.

Speaker 8 All three of the teammates told me stories about how Coach Lars would try to force them to practice when they had real injuries or were seriously sick.

Speaker 8 Trinity says says Lars didn't believe in days off.

Speaker 8 And on the swim team, this is pretty clear that a lot of these practices that were supposed to be voluntary under NCAA rules weren't.

Speaker 8 The NCAA actually suspended Jorgensen for three years for going over limits on practice hours.

Speaker 1 The NCAA literally requires days off. There are all these rules that are strict about practice hours in season versus the off season.

Speaker 1 But you're describing an ecosystem where there is a very powerful coach who is making them do things that they're actually not supposed to be doing.

Speaker 8 Yeah. And they would talk about depression being super common, a lot of behavior that looked like disordered eating.

Speaker 8 They said that Coach Lars pressured them or their teammates to lose extreme amounts of body fat down to 10 or 12%, which can be in the unhealthy range.

Speaker 8 They said that he would make fun of other teammates for being fat.

Speaker 23 And these are, let me remind you, D1 swimmers it's like okay this person is one of the best swimmers on your team and you're saying you're making jokes about her being fat and not needing to eat cookies like i'm a worse swimmer than her so that must mean that i need to lose weight too

Speaker 23 the way that he talked about and treated weight was just not normal

Speaker 8 And they had all of this sort of insecurity that they described based on what they were going through with Coach Lars on the team.

Speaker 23 And I'm not going to sit here and say that like,

Speaker 23 you know, Kentucky swimming is a source of like all my mental health problems and why I, you know, struggled with food in college and still sometimes do now to this day. But

Speaker 23 I know that if I hadn't been in that environment, I wouldn't have had a lot of the thoughts or struggles that I did.

Speaker 23 I can't think of a single teammate I had where now I'm like, wow, that person was like really confident in themselves and their body. They spoke about themselves very well.

Speaker 23 I just, I can't think of anyone. And that's where it's like, this is nuts.

Speaker 1 Which is to say that this is not the way that Riley Gaines characterized her swimming experience in swimming against the current.

Speaker 8 No, you wouldn't get any of this if you read Riley's memoir. She does call some of his comments, quote, utter savagery, end quote.

Speaker 8 But she says that this was for the purpose of motivating them, that this was just his coaching style, and it was all to make them better.

Speaker 8 Lars' goal was to enforce a positive and healthy team culture, knowing that it would, in turn, bring athletic success. His mindset about winning wasn't solely focused on swimming.

Speaker 8 It wasn't just about being the top swimmers in the nation. It was about being women of great character and students who excel in the classroom as well.

Speaker 8 Riley didn't respond to my multiple requests for interviews, detailed questions about all this stuff. Her lawyer didn't respond to my questions either.

Speaker 8 And we're going to get to what the University of Kentucky had to say about this.

Speaker 1 But this program at the time, if you go through the just the public records here, it's not just the story of like a hard ass coach who's running things and being demanding of his players.

Speaker 1 It seems like there is a depth of the dysfunction that is also worth citing here.

Speaker 8 Yeah, this is... a stack of papers from one of the investigations into the University of Kentucky swim team at this time.

Speaker 8 And it's a 2019 sexual harassment investigation, not into Coach Lars, but into his assistant coach, Chip Klein.

Speaker 8 This investigation started after a bunch of swimmers had mentioned concerns about Klein in their exit interview, so the university started looking into it.

Speaker 8 And after going through their process, by what they call a preponderance of the evidence, which is basically like more likely than not, this is true.

Speaker 8 Klein had allegedly touched a swimmer's leg under her towel at a meet, forced that same swimmer to hug him before letting her enter the team room.

Speaker 8 made sexual comments about her and about other swimmers, things like comparing their bodies to meat, things like saying, quote, with a butt like that, she ought to be a good swimmer.

Speaker 1 And so, what is the consequence of what this investigation finds? What does the school do in response?

Speaker 8 Yeah, so while it's investigating, the school puts Klein on a suspension.

Speaker 8 That suspension stays in effect for the whole rest of the year, and then they decline to renew his contract at the end of the year.

Speaker 8 And at the same time, they also temporarily suspended Coach Lars himself for six days for failing to report what he knew about Klein's conduct.

Speaker 1 And so we should also say here that you requested comment from Chip Klein.

Speaker 1 And Chip Klein, the assistant in question, who worked for Lars Jorgensen, Coach Lars, said, in part, quote, I choose not to respond to this request out of respect for what was supposed to be a confidential process, end quote.

Speaker 1 And I do want to return, by the way, to Coach Lars himself in just a bit here, but the question of, again, storytelling, why wasn't this stuff in Riley Gaines' book?

Speaker 1 It raises a question of that itself being a conspicuous choice now that you see it through this lens.

Speaker 8 Right. I mean, it would suggest that there might be more serious problems in women's sports than trans people.

Speaker 1 The version of this story and the version of Riley Gaines, right, that continues to go viral online to the point that she is this leading figure in the Trump MAGA Republican movement.

Speaker 1 How different is the person that these teammates see on television from the Riley Gaines that they swam with back in 2019, 2020.

Speaker 8 It's really clear that Riley has gone through a significant evolution.

Speaker 8 Trinity, who was friends with her at the time, says that Riley in college was really different than her super Christian, super conservative public persona these days.

Speaker 8 And according to my 31-page timeline of Riley's life, this is 2021 after Trump left office. They took a two-hour drive together up to another teammate's family lake house.

Speaker 23 This is so funny looking back on.

Speaker 23 I drove a car of people and like Riley was in my front seat. We talked the two hours there and back.
And

Speaker 23 we both have conservative Christian upbringings.

Speaker 23 Like kind of like talked about that and shared just about like

Speaker 23 dads that were definitely more like old school and her making a comment just being like, Yeah, like I'm not like a die-hard tromper.

Speaker 23 And that really like tracked with everything.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 23 I mean, to me, like that made sense and tracked with what I, what I had seen. Like, Riley was a very down-to-earth, very practical person.

Speaker 23 As a queer person that swam on that team, I never was like, wow, I feel like Riley's going to hate crying me today or like Riley makes me feel unsafe.

Speaker 8 I am so grateful to see President Trump's quick and decisive action to uphold his campaign promise and protect female athletes.

Speaker 23 If you told me

Speaker 23 four years ago that Riley Gaines was going to be the spokesperson for the anti-trans movement, be speaking with Trump, I'd be like, what? You're crazy. Like, she doesn't even actually like him.

Speaker 1 And, you know, when you hear that, and you even make allowances for the fact that all of us, I assume both of us, were probably different in college than we are now, right?

Speaker 1 It does make me want to really understand

Speaker 1 what the happened. The story here, like, it takes a turn, and

Speaker 1 where that takes us seems like it's worthy of, again,

Speaker 1 a return to your 31-page timeline about her life.

Speaker 8 Yeah, there's definitely a transformation that happens at the time that Riley graduates. There's a radicalization that happens, and we see her become someone who's unrecognizable.

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Speaker 7 It's holiday cheer arriving at Ulta Beauty with gifts for everyone on your list.

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Speaker 11 Go all out with timeless fragrances from YSL, Ariana Grande, and Carolina Herrera.

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Speaker 1 So I take us back now to the part of your 31-page timeline of the life of Riley Gaines, where the origin story that she has sanctioned is about to take place.

Speaker 1 Because here is Riley Gaines and here is Coach Lars at at this sporting event at the crux of American politics, the 2022 NCAA Women's Swimming Championships, which is not only the most controversial sporting event in America's recent history, it's also the one that I don't think people have ever actually seen.

Speaker 8 Oh, no chance.

Speaker 28 It's the final in the women's 500-yard freestyle.

Speaker 28 And you can see and feel the tension in this building.

Speaker 8 Okay, so we're in Atlanta. This is Georgia Tech's pool.
It's March.

Speaker 8 Outside the facility, there are anti-trans protesters because the most notorious star in women's college swimming at the time is Leah Thomas.

Speaker 29 Transgender swimmer Leah Thomas breaking barriers and records. But in a new article, Sports Illustrated calls the college senior the most controversial athlete in America.

Speaker 30 And tonight, controversy continues to swirl around the University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Leah Thomas, whose continued participation in and dominance of women's swimming prompted the NCAA to issue a rule change.

Speaker 28 Record-breaking transgender pen swimmer Leah Thomas will be allowed to compete in the Ivy League championships.

Speaker 8 Leah Thomas was a swimmer on the University of Pennsylvania men's team for three years. She transitioned during college and then COVID came around.

Speaker 8 She took a year off and by the time she came back, she was eligible for the women's team under NCAA policy, which at the time let trans women compete after being on testosterone suppressants for 12 months.

Speaker 8 But there was a problem once she came back and started competing on the women's team. She was winning.

Speaker 31 I do remember, you know, as we were training for NCAAs, people being like, oh my gosh, is she going to be there? Is she going to compete?

Speaker 8 One of the swimmers who I talked to agreed to go on tape on the condition that we modulate her voice.

Speaker 8 She was actually there at the NCAA 2022 championship, and she says that the women on her team were obsessing over Thomas.

Speaker 31 Is she going to be in our locker room? I'm going to look at her when we're in our locker room.

Speaker 8 So was Riley part of this buzz?

Speaker 31 She was being such a bitch about the whole thing, but I just know that like her and Lars and some of the other coaches would just talk about like how disgusting it was and unfair and they just couldn't believe it was happening and they didn't want to be in the pool or around

Speaker 31 and all of this.

Speaker 31 Just kind of stuff like that.

Speaker 28 Leah Thomas pulling away over the final 150 meters.

Speaker 1 Had to work for it. And so Leah's first race, by the way, was the 500-yard freestyle, which Riley Gaines was not competing in.
You can actually just see Leah pulling away at the end to win this one.

Speaker 1 Not dominant, but a victory.

Speaker 31 It wasn't a particularly fast time to win the 500-free. It was like a notably slow winning time for the 500 free in the past 10 years.

Speaker 31 So people were like acting insane over this. Like she'd gone this jaw-dropping Katie Ludecki rivaling time, and that's just not what happened.

Speaker 28 It's the 200-yard freestyle final.

Speaker 1 But as for the race that did drop jaws

Speaker 1 over time, the race that did launch the anti-trans athlete movement we've been talking about,

Speaker 1 That one was not the 500-yard freestyle. It was this.

Speaker 1 It was the 200-yard freestyle, which is where Leah Thomas and Riley Gaines are in the pool at the same time.

Speaker 1 And I just got to note that this is, in fact, Riley Gaines' best event, the one that she's most comfortable swimming.

Speaker 1 And this time capsule that we're watching here, while it is remarkable from the larger historical, sociological perspective, as a race, it's pretty uneventful.

Speaker 8 Taylor Ruck from Stanford is winning the whole time, wire-to-wire.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Taylor Ruck blows away the field, wins easily, and coming in fifth place with the same exact time of one minute and 43.40 seconds.

Speaker 1 As you can see on the leaderboard right here, are Riley Gaines

Speaker 1 and Leah Thomas.

Speaker 31 We see her time come in and we're like, okay, like fifth. That's not what she wanted, but that's the highest she's ever placed at NCAA.
She's going to be, she has to be happy.

Speaker 31 She had a time, but that's the highest she's ever gotten. And then I remember looking over and we were like,

Speaker 31 like this isn't good.

Speaker 1 And the thing that happens next is where you begin to glimpse the familiar version of the story that we know.

Speaker 1 On the Daily Wire, which is Ben Shapiro's website, they publish an interview with Riley Gaines. And the headline of this article, Madison, is what?

Speaker 8 I left there with no trophy. NCAA female swimmer who tied for fifth, the trans athlete, says officials put Leah Thomas ahead of her.

Speaker 1 Right. And so now you see the trophy.

Speaker 1 You see the focus on how the NCAA had an official that insisted that Leah Thomas get the fifth place trophy to hold on the podium, meaning that Riley Gaines had to hold the sixth place trophy, which is not as, I guess, fifth placey in terms of what it felt like in her hand.

Speaker 1 She would get the fifth place trophy in the mail as a result. And this story keeps on getting printed and reprinted.
And it's the media coverage that defined the debate.

Speaker 8 It is the story that doesn't die, Pablo.

Speaker 8 You know, in that first Daily Wire article, she says, I am in full support of her, in full support of her transition and her swimming career and everything like that, because there's no doubt that she works hard too, that she's just abiding by the rules that the NCAA put in place.

Speaker 1 I mean, what that is, is that's that's the Riley Gaines who gave her queer teammate a ride.

Speaker 8 That's her. That's that's the starting point for Riley Gaines here.

Speaker 1 And after the Daily Wire, naturally, in the sequence here, comes an interview. on Right Wing Talk Radio with Clay Travis.

Speaker 32 We're talking to Riley Gaines, University of Kentucky senior swimmer who competed against Leah Thomas, transgender swimmer at the NCAA championships.

Speaker 33 Riley, what is the process like?

Speaker 32 And I believe I saw you comment on this in a Daily Wire article.

Speaker 33 Do you guys share dressing rooms?

Speaker 32 Do you share locker rooms with a biological male who identifies as a woman in advance of the competitions or after the competitions?

Speaker 34 Right. So the meet this last week was all-female meet.
And so there wasn't even a male locker room opportunity because there are no

Speaker 34 males on deck. And so going into the meet, we were all curious what the situation would be.

Speaker 34 And so we were just told that we could all use that locker room, which is not a norm sharing locker rooms like that. And so it was a bit shocking that that was allowed.
That's a whole different.

Speaker 34 issue within itself

Speaker 34 and so I would say we were all extremely surprised and you know uncomfortable with that because

Speaker 34 there are girls who that's not something they would agree to doing to,

Speaker 34 you know, to consent to. And so it just seems like.

Speaker 33 So sorry to cut you off here, but I just want to, you do see a roadmap there

Speaker 1 for what the

Speaker 1 framework of this event ends up becoming.

Speaker 8 Right. You get Clay Travis in a conversation about.
sexual assault and consent.

Speaker 32 But I just wanted to build on this a little bit.

Speaker 32 So you have a biological man who is allowed to come into the locker room that you guys are in, preparing to compete, getting ready to swim, and he is using the same locker room as you guys are?

Speaker 33 And if so, what is the reaction in the locker room?

Speaker 32 Because historically, if a man walks into a women's locker room, I mean, that's a crime in

Speaker 8 you can hear how Riley's tone starts to change a little bit.

Speaker 34 Right. I think the NCAA,

Speaker 34 you know, did make it seem like it was something that,

Speaker 34 oh, just we'll, we'll just all share locker rooms. But, you know, there are so many girls who, you know, even face, have faced sexual assault.

Speaker 34 And this kind of thing can be traumatic on just so many different levels.

Speaker 1 And so the whole like misgendering stuff, even aside, right?

Speaker 1 We're talking just about the narrative here, the storytelling contest here, and sexual assault coming up, which again, brings up this image, this template.

Speaker 1 for how a trans athlete is not merely someone who's going to take your trophy from you, take your scholarship from your kids. They're going to be predators preying on your daughters.

Speaker 8 Right.

Speaker 1 And so just the encounter, by the way, just the sheer interaction in the locker room between Leah Thomas and Riley Gaines.

Speaker 1 I do want to fact check that.

Speaker 8 Yeah. So obviously I wasn't there.
You weren't there. Leah Thomas declined an interview request, understandably.
Riley didn't get back to me.

Speaker 8 But I did talk to not just the anonymous swimmer we heard from earlier, but also two other swimmers who competed at the NCAA's, two of whom say they changed with Leah there in the locker room, and they were pretty eager to help me fact-check this.

Speaker 8 Riley's teammate, who we'll hear from now, refers to the locker room as the bathroom situation.

Speaker 31 NCAA's is only women's and then it's only men's, so they open up all of the bathrooms to the athletes. So there's no men's restroom.
It's just, this is the women's restroom.

Speaker 8 She says that in the locker room, Leah was just changing in a corner, wrapped in a towel, keeping to herself.

Speaker 31 We're not very comfortable being naked. People don't usually cover themselves with towels to change or like go in bathroom stalls or anything like that.

Speaker 31 But any of the times I would see her in there, you know, she's like wrapped in her towel. She's turned around, not facing anyone.
I felt bad for her.

Speaker 31 I was like, she didn't ask to be put in this environment with these people and treated this way. She just wanted to come and swim.

Speaker 1 That story is not the one that we hear on Fox News. And then Riley Gaines is on with with none other than Tucker Carlson.

Speaker 35 I have such an amazing support system at the University of Kentucky,

Speaker 35 whether that be from the athletic director all the way down to my head coach, Lars Jorgensen.

Speaker 35 But just speaking for them, it's just totally wrong.

Speaker 35 And I know I can't speak for everyone, but I am almost certain I'm speaking for a large majority of female athletes that this is just not okay and it's not fair.

Speaker 1 There's the name check of Coach Lars as part of this amazing support system that that she is describing.

Speaker 8 And really, really quickly, she starts getting involved in politics. She actually goes to the Kentucky state legislature trying to get lawmakers to override the governor's veto of a trans sports ban.

Speaker 8 And they do within a month, within a month of swimming against Leah Thomas. So it's just this immediate transition.

Speaker 1 And just a reminder here, we're in the middle of a midterm election year. And so now we're months removed from the NCAAs.

Speaker 1 And Riley Gaines Gaines gets put into campaign ads speaking for girls all across America.

Speaker 8 I trained from an early age, giving it my all to achieve my dream. We see her in a campaign ad for Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul.

Speaker 8 But Rand Paul is not afraid to fight for fairness for women and girls, and that's why I'm supporting him.

Speaker 8 We see her in an ad for then Republican Governor of South Dakota, Christy Noam. Christy Noam stood up for us, passing the toughest law in the country to defend female sports.

Speaker 1 Also happens to to be, by the way, the now Secretary of Homeland Security in charge of ICE.

Speaker 8 Here is Herschel Walker. But my senior year, I was forced to compete against a biological male.

Speaker 36 That's unfair and wrong.

Speaker 8 A man won the swimming title that belonged to a woman, and Senator Warnock voted to let it happen.

Speaker 2 Why not sofra to stand up for female athletes?

Speaker 8 Herschel Walker stands up for what's right. By the way, this ad came out after allegations of domestic violence from Herschel Walker's son.

Speaker 8 Then, by the summer of 2022, I think this is when like a lot of America gets to see Riley Gaines for the first time. She's really breaking through when she gets called on stage at CPAC.

Speaker 1 This is the conservative political action conference at which none other than Donald Trump personally summons onto the stage, quote, Where's our beautiful great swimmer, Gaines?

Speaker 2 Where's Gaines? Look at, come up here.

Speaker 3 Will you please come up with, come up, come up, come up.

Speaker 2 This is a great champion.

Speaker 2 And she was beating everybody, and then one day she looked over and said, that's the largest human being I've ever seen.

Speaker 8 Riley Gaines' timing is really good.

Speaker 8 Like, she is coming in after 14 states have already passed these transports bans. Like, this isn't a brand new cause.

Speaker 8 This has already been a cause that Republican politicians have been pushing in the states for a couple of years now. It's been catching on.
It's been working.

Speaker 8 But as you know, probably like the problem that they have is that they just don't have a lot of trans athletes to point to. There are very, very few of them.

Speaker 8 So how do you see that this is a real problem?

Speaker 8 It's extremely convenient to go point at somebody like Riley Gaines who can say, hi, I was a victim of this, who can go sit in the Kentucky legislature and say, look, there is a real victim of these policies.

Speaker 8 And that's, I think, why her story breaks through.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's aren't enough examples of female athletes, period, who are losing to trans athletes because there aren't that many trans athletes in general.

Speaker 1 And so you get Riley Gaines testifying not just at the Virginia state legislature, but at the Kansas state legislature and the North Carolina state legislature, all for these anti-trans bills that are being, again, put in front of these voting bodies.

Speaker 8 The NCAA forced female swimmers to share a locker room with Thomas, a 6'4, 22-year-old male equipped with an exposing male genitalia in a room full of vulnerable, undressed women.

Speaker 1 And in each one of those cases, what you see is that it's not just the Leah Thomas story.

Speaker 8 From 18 to 22-year-old girls who were exposed to male body parts.

Speaker 1 She, this single data point, Riley Gaines, is now this avatar for all girls everywhere.

Speaker 8 Our experiences as Z1 swimmers, it's not unique.

Speaker 1 Who are in danger of quote-unquote men, these predators in women's sports. And she goes on the road.
She continues to go on the road. I mean, she's giving speeches at college campuses.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's not unlike Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 8 The events that she does on college campuses, some of them are actually sponsored by Turning Point USA, the conservative youth organization founded by Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 8 And they

Speaker 8 popularized the model of sending right-wing provocateurs to go speak on college campuses and then making a lot of content out of it and really trying to make like political hay when students come out to protest.

Speaker 1 In 2023, with the one-year anniversary of the NCAA championships approaching now, that relatively boring race that we watched on ESPN earlier in the episode, Riley Gaines goes on the podcast of the late Charlie Kirk himself.

Speaker 8 The NCAA allowed us as female athletes to not even just allow,

Speaker 8 they encourage us as female athletes to participate in Leah Thomas' sexual arousement and Leah Thomas's fetish.

Speaker 8 And you can hear in this Charlie Kirk podcast at this time just how much it's been dialed up, the extremism and the outward transphobia.

Speaker 37 And again, I blame the decline of American men.

Speaker 37 This never should have been, you know, you should have, someone should have just took care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or 60s.

Speaker 37 Yeah, I mean, look, Thomas should be institutionalized and should be given some help, obviously. You should not be exposing yourself to other women.
You're a freak, you're a voyeur.

Speaker 1 It should be illegal.

Speaker 32 Okay, and by the way.

Speaker 1 And it goes on, obviously, but you can see already, like, this is, I mean, this is, it's just,

Speaker 1 I would say it's profoundly fed up, right? Like the way in which you're now alleging criminality.

Speaker 1 Not like sports disadvantage, but like actual criminality here from these athletes who are trying to compete.

Speaker 8 We have fully turned the corner here from this is about fairness in women's sports to actually starting to allege that this is a kind of sexual assault.

Speaker 8 This is some of the most like extreme, perverse, anti-trans talking points that you're going to find anywhere on the internet.

Speaker 8 And it's moving from Charlie Kirk's podcast to around the same time, an appearance on Fox News. We did not give our consent.
They did not ask for our consent.

Speaker 8 But in that locker room, we turned around and there's a 6'4 biological man dropping his pants and watching us undress. And we're exposed to male genitalia.

Speaker 8 And so that, to me, was worse than the competition piece.

Speaker 8 Not even probably a year, two years ago, this would have been considered some form of sexual assault, voyeurism.

Speaker 1 And that rhetoric there, like the actual equating of being a trans athlete competing and changing in a locker room to some form of sexual assault, to quote Riley Gaines just then.

Speaker 1 This is how we get to June of this year, where there's there's this other wildly viral story because Riley Gaines decides to post to her now more than 1.6 million followers on X

Speaker 1 the video of Simone Biles testifying to Congress about the horror of being abused by USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nasser.

Speaker 8 I don't want another young gymnast, Olympic athlete, or any individual to experience the horror that I and hundreds of others have endured before, during, and continuing to this day

Speaker 8 in the wake

Speaker 8 of the larynx abuse.

Speaker 1 And what Riley Gaines posts here in this split-screen side-by-side thing that she does on this tweet, where on the left it's the video of Simone Biles, and on the right, it's a screenshot of a tweet by Simone Biles that called Riley Gaines a bully.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's just hard to evade the extreme nature of the argument that that she's now officially making.

Speaker 8 Yeah. And

Speaker 8 Simone Biles was tweeting this in response to Riley misgendering a high school softball player.

Speaker 8 Riley's caption on that tweet was, quote, Simone Biles when she had to endure a predatory man versus Simone Biles when other girls have to endure predatory men, end quote.

Speaker 8 So when Riley Games is saying predatory men in this tweet, she's putting trans women in women's sports on the same spectrum as Larry Nasser. Like that's what she's doing here.

Speaker 8 And not only is she saying that they're men, she's saying that if they participate in women's sports, that's a kind of abuse.

Speaker 1 Oh, the equivalent she's making there is that Larry Nasser, again, responsible for the sexual assault and predation of more than 100 athletes.

Speaker 1 That is very similar to what Riley Gaines experienced when she lost to a trans athlete and tied for fifth at the NCAA swimming championships.

Speaker 8 And after all of this, it's Simone Biles who actually apologizes. She had gone and said said earlier that Riley Gaines' body was like a man's, which I think everyone would say that crossed a line.

Speaker 8 But there was no apology from Riley after making this comparison. In fact, she doubled down.

Speaker 1 And to be clear, like she has access now to every rung of the media ladder.

Speaker 8 Yeah, to recap, Daily Wire, Clay Travis, Charlie Kirk, Fox News, all day, every day.

Speaker 8 And I regret to inform you that Riley Gaines, like you, is also a podcaster.

Speaker 1 I was worried that that connection was also going to be made.

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Speaker 1 So Riley Gaines, like me, is in fact a podcaster, but she is also, not just that, she is working for Fox News as a frequent contributor. She's a political figure.

Speaker 1 She's a speaker on college campuses at Turning Point USA, formerly hired as a contributor last year, the same year, by the way, 2024, where she became the vice chair, Madison, of something called the Athletes for America Coalition at the America First Policy Institute.

Speaker 1 This resume, this ever-expanding resume, how enriching is it?

Speaker 8 Okay, so six months ago, when you sent me down this rabbit hole, this is absolutely what I wanted to find out. Like, how much money is Riley Gaines actually making?

Speaker 8 So,

Speaker 8 I hear that on this podcast, you like tax forms. I have plenty of them.

Speaker 1 That is my deviance. My deviance is my fetish is tax forms.

Speaker 8 I am so sorry.

Speaker 8 So, the Federal Election Commission, this is actually a disclosure from the FEC. I think you might have copies there too.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Yes, I do.

Speaker 1 And what you wind up seeing in these documents is that over the last three years, from 2023 to 2025, speaker fees for Riley Gaines, as paid out by various state and local Republican committees, have more than octupled.

Speaker 8 So in 2023, we have Riley Gaines making $3,000 at an appearance in Kentucky.

Speaker 1 In 2024, we're seeing a $13,929 fee from the Republican Central Committee in Nevada.

Speaker 8 And then on page 45 of a filing from Harris County Republicans in Texas, this past June, $25,000.

Speaker 1 Again, more than eight times bigger than two years earlier, tracking right alongside the sharpening and perfecting of this whole trans inclusion as sexual assault argument from Riley Gaines in dozens upon dozens and dozens of appearances all over Fox News.

Speaker 2 Riley Riley Gaines joins us now.

Speaker 1 Riley Gaines joins us right now with Reaction Real.

Speaker 8 Riley Gaines, she's America's number one feminist as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 38 An ambassador at the Independent Women's Forum. Riley Gaines.
Riley, good morning. Thanks for being here.

Speaker 1 Riley Gaines is with us.

Speaker 28 Riley, how are you?

Speaker 1 But that's not all, by the way, because Riley Gaines also got a job as a spokesperson. At the Independent Women's Forum in 2022, which helped her get directly involved in politics.

Speaker 1 Riley Gaines has now testified or appeared with politicians in at least 21 states by our count so far.

Speaker 8 I feel frustrated, I feel betrayed, I feel heartbroken, I feel demoralized that we have to be here.

Speaker 1 And on top of that, there was the grand opening in 2023 now of the Riley Gaines Center.

Speaker 1 A center which was founded at something called the Leadership Institute, which turns out to be a conservative nonprofit that has been recruiting and training right-wing activists for like 50 years.

Speaker 1 The mission of the Riley Gaines Center was very specific. It was to recruit other student athletes who had been, quote, harmed by zealots of transgender ideology.

Speaker 8 Part of her job working for the Leadership Institute here is to go give out actual medals, Pablo, literal medals with the Leadership Institute logo on them to other girls and women who reject trans women in sports.

Speaker 8 Mini-mies of Riley Gaines, essentially.

Speaker 1 And according to their tax forms, Riley Gaines, director of the Riley Gaines Center, pocketed $126,523

Speaker 1 within just five months of her center's founding. Raising this larger question of who exactly was funding this center named after a 23-year-old.

Speaker 8 So they're a nonprofit. They don't have to disclose their donors publicly.
But by going and pulling tax forms for other powerful conservative foundations, I was able to find one of these funders. And

Speaker 8 this one is the

Speaker 8 Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation.

Speaker 1 Betsy DeVos, of course, Donald Trump's first term education secretary, who was also part of a very well-connected family.

Speaker 8 Yeah, some of the most powerful funders, some of the biggest funders in Republican politics. We should say the sister of former Blackwater founder Eric Prince.

Speaker 8 You know, her name is DeVos because she married into the family that co-founded the Health and Beauty Empire, Amway.

Speaker 1 Which is also why I can very safely declare that the family that owns the Orlando Magic are also

Speaker 1 the DeVoses and also some of the many dollars behind the Riley Gaines Center.

Speaker 8 And you can see on their tax form, Leadership Institute, $100,000 in 2023.

Speaker 1 The main character, the star of the anti-trans athlete movement, this avatar for the MAGA Republican effort, you're saying that that person, Riley Gaines, happens to be funded by billionaire NBA owners.

Speaker 8 The Riley Gaines Center definitely was.

Speaker 1 And so as we put tax forms right alongside her appearances on Fox News, it is important to remind ourselves that this

Speaker 1 worked beyond even the whole like Simone Biles thing, which was abhorrent in terms of its false equivalents. I just remember the effectiveness, the normalization.
of this whole conversation.

Speaker 1 Like there were the campaign ads, Madison, that I'm sure you remember in the middle of major league baseball playoff games that apparently helped turn the election in which they declared very proudly kamala's agenda is they them not you i'm donald j trump and i approve this message kamala is for they them

Speaker 1 president trump is for you there is polling saying that these ads did shift voters and the nca meanwhile they did also ban trans women from women's sports this happened the day after donald trump signed that executive order in front of riley gains wearing all white at the white house in in the video we started this episode with.

Speaker 8 Where he says Trump has said it's a big reason that he won back the White House. And then he credited Riley.

Speaker 1 And by the way, just to keep up the accounting here, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic committees effectively did the same thing this summer because of Donald Trump riding this wave of popular momentum.

Speaker 1 All of which is to say that as Coach Lars saw potential in Riley Gaines, right? Motivating her by claiming that she had a lack of talent, She proved that she was a prospect worth investing in.

Speaker 1 She has remade American public policy in her image.

Speaker 1 The movement that she is the face of works because her story, her storytelling is believed by so many parents and Americans who see this story through her eyes.

Speaker 8 We've got the NCAA ban. We've got the Olympic ban.
We've got these kinds of policy changes that, you know, and this is a key point, could actually maybe be undone in the future pretty easily.

Speaker 8 You know, if we get a new president, maybe there's a new executive order, maybe the U.S. Olympic Paralympic Committee changes its mind.

Speaker 8 So the conundrum for Riley Gaines right now is how do we make these policy changes, these trans sports bans permanent? or at least more permanent than Trump?

Speaker 8 How do you make them apply nationwide so that no trans girl, K-12, college, even Blue States, New York, California, none of them can play on a girls team. And how do you do that permanently?

Speaker 8 Use the courts.

Speaker 26 A new lawsuit could have a big impact on who can and who can't compete in college sports.

Speaker 28 Riley Gaines and 15 other female athletes just filed a lawsuit against the NCAA.

Speaker 8 She says this development was due time and that the NCAA has been served.

Speaker 1 Gaines v. NCAA.

Speaker 1 This big lawsuit that's now widening its way through the court system.

Speaker 1 Who is behind that? Who's funding that one?

Speaker 8 I'm so sorry to say that it is time to listen to Riley Gaines' podcast.

Speaker 8 Today's guest is Bill Bach. He was an NCAA official.
His story is pretty incredible. Because in this episode, Riley Gaines introduces us to someone who has been dodging Mike Hall's, her lawyer.

Speaker 8 He's actually an experienced litigator.

Speaker 8 He has substantial experience with sports law and sports during drug testing. He was actually the general counsel of the U.S.
Anti-Doping Agency for 13 years.

Speaker 8 He's represented clients in high-profile investigations and litigation, including Lance Armstrong. And after those 13 years at the U.S.

Speaker 8 Anti-Doping Agency, actually not representing Lance Armstrong, taking down Lance Armstrong, this lawyer, Bill Bach, left his job in 2020 and got a new client. Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 Of course.

Speaker 8 This is when Trump was denying the results of the 2020 election.

Speaker 1 I believe I remember Bill Bach, who also worked for the NCAA itself. He was on this committee that handed down punishments to schools that break like NCAA rules and stuff before quitting in protest

Speaker 1 because he wrote a giant op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he accused the NCAA of, quote, regressive, discriminatory, anti-woman policies, end quote.

Speaker 1 And it seems like the origin story for his position there in the pages of the Wall Street Journal was that

Speaker 1 Riley Gaines happened to tie Leah Thomas for fifth place in Atlanta at the NCAA championships.

Speaker 8 The swimming race that started it all.

Speaker 8 And now he's working for her. Now she is his client.
And P.S., he's not critiquing how the NCAA treats female athletes in other contexts. This is all about trans people.

Speaker 27 The NCAA has imposed a radical anti-woman agenda on college sports, redefined women as a testosterone level, permitted men to compete on women's teams,

Speaker 27 destroyed female safe spaces in women's locker rooms by authorizing naked men possessing full male genitalia to disrobe in front of non-consenting college women.

Speaker 1 And so as we continue to examine the grift that keeps on giving,

Speaker 1 Bill Bach's legal argument here in Gaines v NCAA, which is filed in 2024, it does have to do with Title IX.

Speaker 1 This is the law from the 1970s that banned sex discrimination in American schools.

Speaker 1 Quote: No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.

Speaker 1 End quote.

Speaker 8 Riley Gaines is the lead plaintiff in this lawsuit, but Bill Bach also filed on behalf of 15 more female athletes who all have complaints about trans people.

Speaker 8 And they say that letting Leah Thomas swim, but also letting any other trans athlete compete in the women's division violates Title IX.

Speaker 1 Right. The way to get there is legally portray.

Speaker 1 Riley Gaines as this victim and provide a roadmap for the permanent extinction of trans women, trans girls, in K through 12, all the way up to college in terms of their ability to participate in sports.

Speaker 1 And I just have to imagine here, hiring the guy who represented Donald Trump himself, like that cannot be cheap.

Speaker 8 No, I have a tab in my spreadsheet also called Contributions to Icons. And this gets us to yet another nonprofit in the anti-trans movement.

Speaker 8 So ICONS is an acronym for the Independent Council on Women's Sports.

Speaker 8 And at the New York Times last year, they called it the, quote, preeminent organization in the trans sports ban movement, end quote.

Speaker 8 This nonprofit started with press conferences, but it pretty quickly pivoted to focusing on the legal arena. It exists pretty much exclusively to fund lawsuits in the name of Riley Gaines and Company.

Speaker 8 It's got a handful of them all pending in court, all making pretty much the same argument. And Icons is pretty interesting too.

Speaker 8 It was started by a former champion college swimmer at at the University of Arizona and a swim mom, herself a former tennis player at Stanford, who got fired up about these issues because, can you guess?

Speaker 1 I have to imagine a certain swim meet in Atlanta, Georgia.

Speaker 8 The matchup heard around the world.

Speaker 8 So the daughter of the swim mom,

Speaker 8 one of these Icons co-founders, she had actually lost to Leah Thomas a couple times that season. So they had gone head to head.
They had encountered each other at competitions.

Speaker 8 And so if we we look at these tax forms here, what we can see, this is the 2022

Speaker 8 tax form 990 for the Independent Council on Women's Sports. This one says that ICONS went from a $100,000 organization in 2022 to we have this one here from 2024,

Speaker 8 a million dollar organization.

Speaker 1 Like 10 times bigger than it used to be in the span of two years feels appropriate for what we've been discussing this whole time.

Speaker 1 How many other organizations like this are in this like nesting doll of like

Speaker 1 money sources?

Speaker 8 There are so many of these groups. Icons has really broken through.

Speaker 8 And I think that that's because they are not just a rebranding of the same Heritage Foundation, you know, conservative DC think tank.

Speaker 8 They're not a creature of that world so much as they are an outgrowth of people who are involved in women's sports, who care deeply about it, and who have gone through that process, that gateway drug, and landed on

Speaker 8 this increasingly radicalized side of the transgender athlete debate.

Speaker 8 And it's not just the alliance defending freedom, like classic players of the conservative social movement over the last 30 years in America. I know.

Speaker 1 I missed the Cato Institute.

Speaker 8 Those were the days.

Speaker 1 Those were the days. Instead, the donor to icons that apparently we know about is what?

Speaker 8 So XXXY Athletics is a brand, a clothing brand. I've been working with XXXY since they started, but it is surreal to now collaborate with them.

Speaker 8 I have my own line, if you will, with them called the Be Bold Collection. Expect some red, white, and blue for the 4th of July.
It's how we feel about the greatest nation in the world.

Speaker 8 And of course, proclaiming the message that women's sports are only for women.

Speaker 8 Is it sick that I might actually wear something like this if it was a different context?

Speaker 1 I was going to say, if you were in the market for a t-shirt that had the text of Title IX that we read before

Speaker 1 emblazoned across the back, we have

Speaker 1 one candidate for your money.

Speaker 8 This whole brand, if you couldn't tell from the ad, is built on

Speaker 8 arguing in this sort of glossy marketing language that

Speaker 8 trans women are men and that they don't belong in women's sports. It's the whole shtick.
They have a lawsuit out there, a whole other one, saying that we have the right to misgender people.

Speaker 8 This is what this whole brand is built on. And they funnel their money to icons for some of their merch.

Speaker 1 I mean, they're all like these pretty creative instruments to funnel money towards, it turns out, this lawsuit, as well as the other similar lawsuits that Bill Bach seems to be filing.

Speaker 1 And so, how is all that going?

Speaker 8 Riley Gaines' lawsuit just had a court decision.

Speaker 8 The court threw out a lot of it, but it did preserve some of the claims against the NCAA, including the Title IX claim.

Speaker 8 But then, at some point early next year, we have another couple of court cases that are going to be all over the news that we know about.

Speaker 8 And this is because the Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases involving trans athletes. These ones starting from back in 2020 and 2021, the very beginning of this movement.

Speaker 1 And the lawsuits are arguing that Title IX and the Constitution, as a related concern, they actually prohibit banning trans athletes.

Speaker 1 And these athletes, in this case, there's a cross-country runner, a middle schooler in West Virginia. There's a college student in Idaho, also a cross-country runner.
So it's the other way.

Speaker 1 Riley Gaines is arguing Title IX requires banning trans athletes. These cases argue the opposite spin.

Speaker 8 Right. Does Title IX require trans women to be banned from women's sports or does it prohibit you from passing those bans because that's a kind of sex discrimination?

Speaker 8 We're going to get an answer to the

Speaker 8 question of whether these bans are forbidden, presumably next year when the Supreme Court decides these cases, probably by next summer.

Speaker 8 And, you know, P.S., down in the lower courts, the circuit courts, they ruled in favor of the trans athletes. So we're going to find out if the Supreme Court agrees.

Speaker 8 And if they do, that could invalidate all of those state laws that Riley Gaines helped pass banning trans women from women's sports.

Speaker 1 And so I just think of what Riley Gaines told the New York Times this summer in yet another interview that she gave. And she said,

Speaker 1 The gender ideology movement is a house of cards. And I believe it's lying on the sports issue.
This will be the card that makes all of it crumble.

Speaker 8 What she's saying is that sports, the fight over sports, is the key to getting anti-trans policies passed on all of these levels, getting court wins for her and for her allies that are going to have ramifications for trans people's rights.

Speaker 8 And if Title IX doesn't protect trans people from discrimination in education, that has like implications for bathrooms, it has implications for school clubs, all sorts of issues around trans kids being able to go to school as themselves.

Speaker 1 And so now we're just seeing the logic and the incentive structure become clear, which is to say that when it comes to why Riley Gaines might have been telling this story in this way, changing it over time, apparently exaggerating the story of how Leah Thomas inside that fateful bathroom/slash locker room had exposed her to male genitalia, allegedly, which he then went on to equate to, quote, some form of sexual assault.

Speaker 1 The reason that all of that matters, the fact-checking of that, is because it provides the framework for keeping trans people out of not just sports, but pretty much every space in American life.

Speaker 8 There's a whole other lawsuit that we haven't talked about yet.

Speaker 1 At this point, I feel like I'm the person that needs to go for a swim.

Speaker 1 So we've now traced the arc from Riley Gaines growing up, being recruited by Coach Lars to making it to the University of Kentucky, to then feeding into the right-wing outrage machine that has completely dominated the American political moment.

Speaker 1 And there is something else that we haven't even gotten to yet that is relevant to every part of this story.

Speaker 8 So Riley's lawsuit and the other lawsuits over trans athletes, those make a lot of headlines, but there's another case that we haven't talked about. And this brings us back to Coach Lars Jorgensen.

Speaker 8 He was the one who, according to Riley's teammates, imposed punishment swims, ran them ragged. The thing is, it's not just them who have raised these kinds of complaints about Lars Jorgensen.

Speaker 8 In 2023, the year after Riley graduated, other swimmers at the University of Kentucky started complaining about Jorgensen to the athletic department, and they opened an investigation into whether Coach Lars was complying with NCAA rules.

Speaker 8 So I got records from that investigation from the university through a public records request.

Speaker 8 29 swimmers and seven coaches were interviewed, plus alumni wrote in, and they back up pretty much everything that my sources said about Juergensen, from the punishment swims to the eating disorders.

Speaker 8 When I reached out to the University of Kentucky for comment, they told me that Juergenson was removed from the pool deck on May 1st of 2023 in the midst of this investigation.

Speaker 8 He was prohibited from interacting with student athletes and coaches.

Speaker 1 And so Coach Lars, who again was one of Riley's best friends, even post-graduation, was she involved in any of this?

Speaker 8 At this point, she is deep into her own transformation, deep into the never-ending news cycle.

Speaker 8 And so on the day that the news breaks on the Swimming World Insider website, Swim Swam, that this investigation was going on and Jorgensen had been put in leave, Riley was actually testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Speaker 8 She was bringing up the usual talking points about how having men and women's sports is a violation of women's safety, all that now familiar stuff.

Speaker 8 That having men in women's sports is wrong and that it's unfair and it's a violation to, again, our privacy and rights to safety as women.

Speaker 8 And a week after we learn about this investigation on Swim Swam, Jorgensen resigns.

Speaker 8 The University of Kentucky tells me they negotiated a settlement for a fraction of his contract value in exchange for him cooperating with their inquiry.

Speaker 8 And meanwhile, back on Swim Swam Swan in the comments section, which is pretty lively, as I've learned.

Speaker 1 I have heard of Swim Swan before. It is the place for argument, commentary, and it turns out tips in a larger investigation.

Speaker 8 The stories about Juergenson were not just about running swimmers ragged and the kinds of eating disorder pressures that we see throughout women's sports.

Speaker 1 It got even darker.

Speaker 8 And so we find out exactly how much darker in April 2024, and that's when two people on the swim team, both of them former members of the team who Jorgensen had then hired as assistant coaches, they filed another lawsuit alleging that Jorgensen sexually assaulted them.

Speaker 8 One of the swimmers who files this lawsuit, she alleges that Jorgensen forcibly raped her multiple times between 2019 and 2023, which includes Riley's time on the team.

Speaker 8 And it says that he would tell the alleged victim he would ruin her reputation if she told anyone.

Speaker 8 The other one says that in 2022, he groped and kissed her without consent.

Speaker 8 And their complaint also alleges that he raped a third assistant coach at his home after a Christmas party several years earlier. Lars Jorgensen did not respond to questions that I sent him.

Speaker 8 His lawyers didn't either. In court papers, he said that the sexual assault claims are not true.

Speaker 1 What did the diversity itself have to say?

Speaker 8 Yeah, they said that they were not aware of the the most serious allegations until this lawsuit was filed. That's a quote.

Speaker 8 And they continued and said, UK has consistently acted upon and investigated allegations when they were known and when complainants have opted to pursue allegations and participate in the investigative process, end quote.

Speaker 8 And they're saying this because the swimmers who filed the lawsuit say that the university had discouraged them from reporting their claims.

Speaker 1 Right. And the university also is saying, quote, this has prompted an important conversation about what more we can do to ensure the health, safety, and well-being of all community members, end quote.

Speaker 1 And they then go on to list a series of reforms across campus.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 the big question that we have worked our way around to

Speaker 1 from where we started and that climb up through conservative politics and the top of America itself, all the way to this lawsuit here, which,

Speaker 1 as described, is horrific.

Speaker 1 Is

Speaker 1 what do we prioritize and who are we protecting when it comes to the question of what women's sports should be concerned about?

Speaker 8 It's a shifting of the perspective from what you're hearing on Fox News. One of the assistant coaches who filed the lawsuit against Lars Jorgensen has since transitioned female to male.

Speaker 8 And the lawsuit uses she, her pronouns to talk about the time period around the alleged assaults, which is is why we're doing that too.

Speaker 8 But when the case was first filed, Jorgensen's lawyer at the time brought Riley into it. He said that the allegations had been fabricated to punish Coach Lars for supporting Riley games.

Speaker 8 And that lawyer, Greg Anderson, told the Lexington Herald leader, quote, this all has to do with NCAA woke philosophy.

Speaker 1 I mean, look, the question of are there men who should be considered predators around women's sports? We've mentioned a couple of them earlier. Larry Nasser being one famous example.

Speaker 8 Yeah, these are like fairly common, unfortunately common types of allegations. And, you know, according to the U.S.

Speaker 8 Center for Safe Sport, which is the organization created by Congress as a nonprofit to investigate these types of allegations, coaches are the most common perpetrators of sexual contact also.

Speaker 8 And P.S., the U.S. Center for Safe Sport has been investigating this same case, some of these same allegations.
And in early October, they ruled that Lars Jerkinson was banned from coaching for life.

Speaker 1 And I just cannot help but remember that this is the coach

Speaker 1 that Riley Gaines called one of her best friends.

Speaker 8 One of my best friends.

Speaker 1 in her best-selling memoir that came out in May of 2024.

Speaker 1 And look, I get that this book was probably on the way back from the printer by then because the lawsuit, you know, this was all filed in April of 2024.

Speaker 1 And I want to just be realistic about publishing timelines and all of that. But when we come to this question of who are the men we are concerned about in sports who have been

Speaker 1 abusive allegedly and predatory allegedly in these spaces that we should be worried about when it comes to our daughters, our girls, our female athletes, What has Riley Gaines said about Coach Lars and these allegations?

Speaker 8 I found one tweet from a few days after the allegations became public.

Speaker 8 And it reads in part, quote, I took the weekend to spend time with current and former University of Kentucky teammates.

Speaker 8 The general consensus is that we are disgusted, heartbroken, and ashamed to be affiliated with a program where anything like this could have been alleged to have happened.

Speaker 8 Lars was someone I trusted, loved, and respected. I would have gone to bat for him and defended him until the end.
I feel entirely blindsided and betrayed.

Speaker 8 She goes on to write: regardless of the allegations, my stance is clear.

Speaker 8 Sexual predators should not be able to obtain or maintain a position of authority over anyone, much less a team of vulnerable, half-naked young women.

Speaker 1 End quote. And I just can't help but just see her stance that she's alluding to there as her larger stance, as if the two things that we've now covered here, the

Speaker 1 experience she had with Leah Thomas and the revelations she says she has now learned in the spring of 2024 about one of her best friends, Coach Lars, who is now this alleged sexual predator, that this all can fit together quite neatly.

Speaker 1 And it's all been consistent this whole time, even though. when it comes to the number of words she's devoted to one versus the other,

Speaker 1 that actually is a race that's not even close.

Speaker 8 I have to say, she's, I mean, she's a 25-year-old. She has this incredible public platform, but this is a lot for anyone to deal with when you have allegations against somebody close to you.

Speaker 8 At the same time, she has just been churning out all of this material, all of this content, all of this outrage about sexual abusers in sports in her framing of it, transgender women.

Speaker 8 That's the spectrum that she puts it on. So she has this platform.
She has plenty to say on this kind of topic, but

Speaker 8 one tweet.

Speaker 1 What has she said about Coach Lars since then?

Speaker 8 I mean, just two months ago on another podcast, she referred to him as a fantastic coach. There's been really very, very little.

Speaker 8 And I just felt this almost like this emptiness, right? There wasn't a lot of satisfaction in doing what I did. I had great friends.
I had a fantastic coach.

Speaker 1 And then we're in the Simone Biles news cycle, which happened after these revelations came out.

Speaker 1 And by the way, it's really hard to overlook the fact that in all of those podcasts, those multiple Fox News appearances, where she was comparing Larry Nasser's sexual abuse to her experience in the locker room with Leah Thomas, she's very clear, it seems, that, quote, what me and my teammates had to go through in terms of the trans athlete competition question

Speaker 8 was certainly sexual abuse drawing and to me that is sexual abuse what me and my teammates had to go through was certainly sexual abuse again that was on Stephen A Smith's podcast and and I look I do want to say

Speaker 1 The voice that you should be listening to on how this all feels, to hold these ideas simultaneously, is not mine. It's not Stephen A's and it's it's not yours, Madison.
Right.

Speaker 1 It does seem like this is why, in fact, you made sure to talk to her actual teammates.

Speaker 8 Yeah, Trinity Ward, if you'll remember the teammate who went on the record with us, she had been so thrilled to be a part of the University of Kentucky swim program.

Speaker 8 But then Coach Lars changed her view of that. And she has so little respect for what Riley has spent her time doing since graduation.

Speaker 23 I don't think that what Riley Gaines does deserves to be called advocacy.

Speaker 23 When we think of advocacy, we think of people

Speaker 1 that are

Speaker 23 campaigning, fighting for

Speaker 23 a better future. And normally the word that comes to mind when you think of advocacy is inclusion, not exclusion.

Speaker 23 If you told most people all you have to do is make hateful statements on the internet, post some ad brands, and you're going to have half the country worshiping you and pinging up your picture on their daughter's wall saying you're an American hero and you're going to never work a real job the rest of your life.

Speaker 23 I mean, most people, that's their dream. Like

Speaker 23 that, that is the easy way.

Speaker 23 In some ways, like really the easy way out. I can't think of anything else besides money and fame that would cause the dramatic transformation in Riley that I've seen.

Speaker 23 Because like I said, I never would have thought that this would happen. And I thought very highly of her before.

Speaker 1 And so at the end here, when it comes to this question of like, how do you tell the story then of Riley Gaines in this context and this movement in this context and these allegations in this full context?

Speaker 1 Is there a summary that you can provide us that we can take with us just to remember like what's actually the real story here?

Speaker 8 I think Trinity Ward deserves the last word here.

Speaker 23 When I wear my UK swimming gear, I've had three times where somebody's approached me and asked me about Riley Gaines. And I've said, well, do you know about Loris Jorgensen?

Speaker 8 And the answer is always no.

Speaker 8 And she says, quote, it's hard for me to care about Riley Gaines tying for fifth when my swim coach is accused of raping my teammates.

Speaker 1 And people shut up pretty quickly after that.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Madison Polly, thank you so much for finally helping us tell this story.

Speaker 8 Glad to do it.

Speaker 1 This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metalark media production.

Speaker 1 And I'll talk to you next time.

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