LSU women’s basketball coach Kim Mulkey ripped the Washington Post over a forthcoming story about her, threatening legal action in a fiery press conference speech on Saturday.
Mulkey accused an unnamed Post journalist of using “sleazy tactics” to solicit negative quotes about her from colleagues and former players. She also slammed the reporter for supposedly “trying to trick” her former college coaches into commenting by misrepresenting her participation in the piece, and of giving unreasonable deadlines for Mulkey and her employer, LSU, to comment on its contents.
“Former players have told me that The Washington Post has contacted them and offered to let them be anonymous in a story if they’ll say negative things about me. The Washington Post has called former disgruntled players to get negative quotes to include in their story,” she said.
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Mulkey did not directly name the reporter but gave enough information to identify him, saying he had written a “hit job” on former Notre Dame football coach Brian Kelly two years earlier. Washington Post reporter Kent Babb, who wrote a story on Kelly in 2022, issued an apparent reply to Mulkey on X on Saturday afternoon. He included the link to his Kelly story and captioned it, “Hit piece?”
Mulkey declined interviews repeatedly because of the reporter’s past work.
“They’re ignoring the forty-plus years of positive stories that they had heard from people about me,” Mulkey added.
“Reporters who give a megaphone to a one-sided embellished version of things aren’t trying to tell the truth. They’re trying to sell newspapers and feed the click machine. This is exactly why people don’t trust journalists and the media anymore. It’s these kinds of sleazy tactics and hatchet jobs that people are just tired of,” she said.
It’s unclear what exactly the Post piece will cover or when it will drop. But based on Mulkey’s preemptive comments, it likely will not paint her in a favorable light. She ended her comments about the piece on Saturday by vowing legal action.
“I’ve hired the best defamation law firm in the country and I will sue The Washington Post if they publish a false story about me,” she said. “Not many people are in a position to hold these kind of journalists accountable, but I am and I’ll do it.”
