In February, a group of men on a sports talk show casually spread a salacious and untrue rumor about the sex life of a teenage girl on national television, resulting in her being humiliated and relentlessly harassed. It felt as though it were 2007 again, and the talk show banter was a brief pause before our nation’s busy schedule of making fun of Britney Spears’s breakdown.

On ESPN’s bro-y The Pat McAfee Show, the titular McAfee introduced a segment on NFL draft picks by gossiping about an undergraduate rumor he’d heard: that a sorority girl at the University of Mississippi had cheated on her fraternity boyfriend with his father. McAfee didn’t mention the young woman or her boyfriend by name, but later shared the clip on X to his 3.2 million followers (the post is still up, as of April 3). Barstool Sports personality Jack Mac then promoted a meme coin named after the girl in question: Mary Kate Cornett, a first-year college student. Cornett denies the rumor, but that hasn’t stopped it from spreading like wildfire.

As reported on the New York Times’ The Athletic, as the rumor spread, the........

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