Barstool founder Dave Portnoy is going after Business Insider and anyone connected to an article the outlet published on him earlier this month accusing Portnoy of violent sexual misconduct.
Portnoy appeared on Tuesday’s episode of “Candace” with Daily Wire host Candace Owens to talk about his battle with Business Insider and the reaction the piece got in the media. Since the article dropped on November 4, Portnoy has gone to great pains to debunk it and prove his side of the story, posting DMs and social media posts from the two major accusers quoted in the piece.
The evidence that Portnoy has published has cast doubt on the claims made in the Business Insider article while bolstering Portnoy’s recollection of what happened with each woman. Despite some of the additional evidence being out for weeks, Business Insider has yet to update its article on Portnoy, titled, “‘I was literally screaming in pain’: Young women say they met Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy for sex and it turned violent and humiliating.”
“This is where I think they made a mistake. I don’t mind conflict, and I’ve been an open book for two decades. I have nothing to hide. Everything that’s embarrassing about me is out there,” Portnoy told Owens. “I know they can dig. They can do whatever. There’s nothing.”
“This is a baseball game. We’re in the top of the second. Like, there’s no chance I’m letting this go. They tried to basically discredit me with one of the most heinous crimes you can commit,” Portnoy said, asserting that the accusations made in the Business Insider article are tantamount to rape. “And if they think I’m just gonna walk away, like, ‘Okay, I cannot prove myself,’ they’re terribly mistaken. There is no chance I’m going to let this just kind of disappear in the coming months.”
“You cannot accuse somebody of a crime without [basis],” he continued. “As I’ve said, the way they describe what happened in the story, that’s rape. They’re like, basically, the woman was running away screaming ‘no, no, no,’ and I continued. That did not happen at all.”
Portnoy conducted a roughly hour-long live stream on Friday where he walked through the Business Insider article and laid out a case of reporting bias coupled with sources with questionable motives. He showed evidence of the reporter having anti-Trump bias. He also published messages and social media posts of one of the accusers in the article showing a similar bias.
Portnoy interviewed former President Donald Trump at the White House in 2020 in what was widely viewed as a friendly interview between the then-president and the CEO of Barstool.
Portnoy also published messages from the other accuser, casting doubt on her claims that her relationship with Portnoy left her in a deep depression. In the messages, she allegedly told Portnoy that she had bragged about her having sex with him.
“I’m going to do whatever I can to make sure that they – you know, if you want call it revenge, whatever – that they pay as much as I have the ability to make them pay for what they did, which to me is knowingly falsely accusing me of rape,” Portnoy said. “They went through my entire social life in eight and a half months and I was able to … discredit the two girls that they found in three days. Eight and a half months.”
“So none of it adds up, and they didn’t include any of the stuff that basically casts serious doubt on why she’s telling me these stories,” he said.