Adam Schefter has for years been understood as a simple PR machine into which brands and agents feed money and bits of info, respectively, and out of which slips various ads and narratives, all stamped with the ESPN logo. This is straightforwardly embarrassing and bad, but his reputation as a little worm who has no ethics has been so well established by now that he would have to do something really fucking gross to make people think even less of him than they already do.
Ladies and gentleman, he did it! Last night, Schefter busied himself with advancing a one-sided narrative that Minnesota Vikings running back Dalvin Cook, who is accused of physically and emotionally abusing his ex-girlfriend, is himself a victim. Schefter obligingly regurgitated the account of Cook's agent, who alleged that a woman, Gracelyn Trimble, entered Cook's home last year and attacked him and a guest.
Schefter did not mention, over multiple hours of tweeting about the incident to his 8.7 million followers that, that in her own lawsuit, Trimble says she went to Cook's house to break up with him and get her things. He does not mention that Trimble says Cook "grabbed her arm, and slung her whole body over the couch, slamming her face into the coffee table and causing her lower forehead and the bridge of her nose to bust open." He did not mention that Trimble says Cook "threatened her, and beat her with a broomstick." He did not mention that Trimble says she learned she had a concussion from the beating. Schefter definitely did not mention the following image, which was included in Trimble's lawsuit. (CW: The image is graphic.)
In fact, Schefter made no mention at all of the fact that the woman had filed a lawsuit against Cook until two hours later, and even then, he only mentioned it in order to further advance the claims of Cook's lawyer.
Schefter's willingness to be a mouthpiece for various agents, lawyers, and owners has always been a core piece of his version of journalism, but what he did last night was downright insidious, and goes beyond all his previous transgressions. It wasn't until hours after he first started tweeting about Cook's lawyer's version of events that Schefter shared the Associated Press story about the incident, which he framed as "dueling allegations."
