Christine Brennan is not backing down.
The longtime USA Today columnist is defending her questioning to Connecticut Sun star DiJonai Carrington — regarding whether she intentionally hit Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark in the eye during a playoff game — and was taken aback by the fiery WNBA players association statement criticizing her and saying she didn’t deserve credentials to cover the league.
“I certainly was surprised,” Brennan said on Sarah Spain’s “Good Game” podcast. “I didn’t take it lightly. I would never take it lightly. I was surprised to hear from, in this case the players association … that they want to ban me, I thought it was a complete overreaction. I think many, many people in journalism thought the exact same thing as we’ve seen in columns and responses, and that’s fine and I’m heartened by that. If people think it’s fine and I should be banned, of course it’s a free country, they can say that.”
WNBPA executive director Terry Carmichael Jackson described Brennan’s questioning as “a blatant attempt to bait a professional athlete into participating in a narrative that is false and designed to fuel racist, homophobic, and misogynistic vitriol on social media.”
Clark, who has led a wave of increased interest for the WNBA this season, suffered a black eye in Game 1 of the Fever-Sun playoff series on Sept. 22 after being hit by Carrington, who was trying to block a Clark pass.
Two days later during an off-day media availability, Brennan asked Carrington the following question: “When you went and kind of swatted at Caitlin, did you intend to hit her in the eye and if so, or if not, either way, could you talk about what happened on that play?”
“I don’t even know why I would intend to hit anybody in the eye. That doesn’t even make sense to me,” Carrington replied. “But no, I didn’t. I didn’t know I hit her, actually. I was trying to make a play on the ball and I guess I followed through and I hit her. So, obviously, it’s never intentional. That’s not even, like, the type of player that I am.”
There was a video from later in the game of Carrington laughing with teammate Marina Mabrey that some people on the internet speculated was related to the Clark incident.
Brennan, who is writing an unauthorized book about Clark but says she was credentialed to cover the series by USA Today, asked Carrington, “Did you and Marina kind of laugh about it afterwards? It looked later on in the game they caught you guys laughing about it.”
“No. I just told you I didn’t even know I hit her. So I can’t laugh about something I didn’t know happened,” Carrington replied.
Brennan addressed the questioning during the podcast appearance.
“Here she comes over to talk to us and she answers a few questions, and I then of course ask her a question that I would ask 100 times out of 100 — and have [asked], 1,000 times out of 1,000, or more — of any athlete,” Brennan said. “An issue in the news, give them a chance to respond, to talk about it. It’s a conduit for them to take it and run with it, to deal with an issue that is out there. And clearly this was in the news, right? I’m not even on Twitter (now X) that much and I couldn’t avoid it.”
She described her questions as “Journalism 101.” Spain pressed Brennan on whether her asking if it was intentional was leading.
“You just give them a chance … give her a chance to answer the question because it was running rampant on the internet,” Brennan said. “It’s out there, so let’s ask the athlete so they can clear the air.”
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