Barstool Sports published and then quickly deleted a crude blog post making light of Mackenzie Lueck, a 23-year-old college student who had been missing for over 10 days. Despite the fact that Francis Ellis, the blog post’s author, was aware that the Salt Lake City police had been investigating a possible suspect and Lueck had been deemed a missing person, it didn’t dissuade him from firing off a few crass, tittering jokes at her expense.
Shortly thereafter, it was reported that Lueck was dead.
After opening with a brief nod to the seriousness of the subject matter, Ellis’s blog is strewn with cheesecake shots from an Instagram account which had been liked by someone with access to Lueck’s account. (The online activity was reported to law enforcement officials by Lueck’s fellow sorority sisters.) He then made sure to highlight that she’d been active on “sugar daddy dating websites” and began digging through her Instagram account.
There he spotted a mention of the Barstool Sports podcast, “Call Her Daddy,” a show featuring two twentysomething women who engage in bawdy sexual conversations. The podcast is mentioned both in the headline and the blog itself, which ended with Ellis glibly mocking the low number of followers Lueck had amassed, adding his “thoughts and prayers.”
Early Friday afternoon, the Salt Lake City Police department announced that Lueck had been allegedly kidnapped and then brutally murdered. Burned tissue samples belonging to the victim were discovered at the suspect’s home. The suspect, who met Lueck at Salt Lake City International Airport early on the morning of June 17, was taken into custody on Friday. In a press conference, a police spokesperson said the family would not be responding to any media requests.
Approximately an hour after the news broke, the blog was removed from the site. The deletion was not made public and no explanation was given for the decision.
In a video posted at 5:56 pm and after The Daily Beast reached out for comment, Dave Portnoy, Barstool Sports’ founder and chief of content, weighed in. Calling it an “absolutely insane move” by Ellis to publish the blog—Ellis allegedly did so without running it by a single editor beforehand—Portnoy apologized, offering his “thoughts and prayers” to the victim’s family. Though Portnoy claims Ellis “meant well” and wasn’t aware of Lueck’s death, his “ridiculous lack of judgment” meant Portnoy was compelled to fire him.
As to how the blog made it on the site without an editor giving it a once-over, Ellis had free rein to publish whatever he saw fit, according to tweets posted by Keith Markovich, Barstool’s editor-in-chief.
What percentage of Barstool bloggers are afforded a similar privilege? That’s unclear. Markovich told The Daily Beast via email: “[T]here are 16 writers that I edit and approve.” He stopped responding when asked how many of their writers can publish on the site without being edited or scrutinized at all. (Barstool currently lists 65 individuals on their masthead as “bloggers.” Ellis has already been removed from the roster.)
Friday evening, Markovich appeared on a Barstool SiriusXM radio broadcast and said Ellis previously chafed when he was subjected to edits. Moving forward, their bloggers’ license to self-publish may be revoked entirely.
In an emailed statement, Ellis apologized profusely, calling his judgment “horrible” and insisting that the responsibility for the post was his and his alone.
“It was a horrific mistake,” he wrote. “I am deeply sorry to the Lueck family for their unfathomable loss. I cannot imagine what they are going through. The last thing they need is some fool on the internet offering thoughts on their ordeal.”
An identical version of the statement was later tweeted out by Ellis.
Part of Ellis’s explanation doesn’t make sense, though. He claims the source for his blog was a New York Post story from Friday morning which mentioned the Instagram like and a People.com aggregated article from June 25. The latter included quotes from a law enforcement official who didn’t think a crime had been committed. Based on these sources, “carelessly, I assumed this meant Mackenzie was fine,” he wrote. But the Post article debunks the notion that foul play had been ruled out entirely. That information was included in Ellis’s blog post.
Ellis, a 30-year-old stand-up comic who joined Barstool in 2017, has written other blogs which might not pass muster at most media companies with a reported $100 million valuation, even one that traffics in misogyny and targeted harassment campaigns.
On more than one occasion, he has blogged homophobic jokes about being sexually attracted to one of his male co-workers. Ellis went to the same well when a reporter emailed him for comment. Despite loving “gay people” Ellis wrote in another blog, he couldn’t return the affections of a man who flirted with him partly because he was in a relationship with a woman and partly “because I’m not a total f*****.” (Asterisks his.)
It had been a tumultuous few days for Ellis. Tuesday night, he and a number of Barstool employees were publicly reamed out by Portnoy for violating the suggested dress code during an awards ceremony. (Portnoy continued ranting about the subpar attire today.)
Getting publicly humiliated by his boss prompted Ellis to post a lengthy, self-flagellating blog. The next day, he mocked the appearance of a co-worker who didn’t take kindly to some of Ellis’s on-air critique
But Ellis isn’t the only Barstool author whose work has been deleted from the site when it crossed the bounds of decency—this, despite CEO Erika Nardini’s boasts that the site doesn’t delete anything. (Nardini did not respond to an emailed request for comment.)
While Brett Kavanaugh was being grilled by the Senate, Ellis penned two blogs, one in the voice of a supposedly enraged leftist and the other a diehard conservative, advocating for and against Kavanaugh’s inclusion on the Supreme Court. About a day later, Portnoy removed them, citing “politics” as being detrimental to the site’s bottom line. Some Barstool employees, though, do have license to dabble in political comedy, but in this instance the posts weren’t deemed funny enough, according to Portnoy’s standards.
Similarly, Portnoy deleted a post after another Barstool blogger called Rihanna fat, saying the author didn’t have the comedic chops to address the subject. When a different Barstool blogger made fun of alt-right provocateur Anthime “Baked Alaska” Gionet and called him a “Nazi,” the post was taken down. “I didn’t think it was a great article,” Portnoy said. Yet another Barstool blogger deleted a post defending an NFL player accused of domestic violence, while Markovich himself retroactively rewrote his blog upon discovering he’d called a 16-year-old cheerleader “hot.” And in the wake of multiple accusations that Barstool had stolen content, the site quietly deleted over 60,000 old social media posts, possibly to avoid further DMCA takedown notices.
Prior to the firing, both Ellis and Markovich seemed to take the blog and its deletion in stride. At 3:40 pm, Markovich tweeted that the ex-Barstool writer would be losing the “liberty to post [his] work without oversight,” as Ellis wrote in his statement.
Minutes later, Ellis responded with a meme:
