Shaun White Dismisses 2016 Sexual Harassment Question as "Gossip" At His Post Gold Medal Victory Press Conference. Actually Bad!
Last night Shaun White dazzled us once again as he took home his third career Gold Medal at the Winter Olympic half pipe. Faced with one run left and one score to beat, White pulled off a 97.75 final run that featured back to back 1440s to win it all. What he did last night didn’t seem possible, but Shaun White is Shaun White. This is what he does. Here’s the final run.
Right after Shaun won, social media obviously went into a frenzy, but some dug up his recent past and his 2016 sexual harassment case against a former female drummer in his band. The details of the case are a bit disturbing, allegedly asking her to cut her hair for the band and essentially firing her for disobeying. He’d also allegedly send a bunch of super graphic texts with erect penises to her randomly and asked her to wear really revealing clothing and underwear. Super weird, weird shit.
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The case went back and forth for a while, him at times calling it a bogus lawsuit, but it ended with White and Lena Zawaideh settling for an undisclosed amount of money to make it go away. Last night at the victory press conference a reporter brought up the allegations and White misguidedly dismissed the whole thing as “gossip.” That did NOT sit well with many people, rightfully so.
Later on he apologized on the Today Show regretting using the word “gossip” and saying he’s a changed man than who he was in 2016.
I feel like the overall depiction of White’s character is that he’s an asshole for the most part and his whole response to these allegations isn’t the biggest surprise. You can’t dismiss this as “gossip.” There are a billion kind of P.R. answers to give at that moment and he chose the one that would piss off a ton of people. He had to have known the question was coming as he stepped back into the victory spotlight, and if he didn’t his PR team should be fired. With the way the whole world is treating the subject of sexual harassment, as they should, you can’t call it gossip especially when you ended up settling to make it go away.
Shaun White was awesome last night, but he was equally as bad in handling this whole situation after. It stinks this is overshadowing such an incredible achievement, but you can’t just pretend a sexual harassment case didn’t happen dude.