Who is Lisa Olson?

For the past few weeks, I have done a tremendous amount of research to find women who were pioneers in the Sports Journalism world. While I have found many inspirational and courageous women, Lisa Olson's story particularly struck me. This was because out of the many women reporters who I have spoken to thus far, only a small number of them recall demeaning treatment in the locker rooms of various sports teams, which lead me to believe that maybe this only occurred before Title IX. But, in actually this was not true. Lisa Olson was a reporter for the Boston Herald and also worked as a reporter with the New England Patriots. Olson recalled one night after a game going into the locker room during the allotted time to do her interviews, but rather than fulfilling this task, she was harassed. Well—some may ask what did she define as harassment? Was is simply not allowing her to interview the men? Or was it not allowing her into the locker room at all. But, it was much worse than that. As she describes it was "mental rape".  The players purposely harassed her in order to make her feel as uncomfortable as possible so that she would eventually leave. Out of pure anger, she did exactly what they wanted her to do—leave.  When this story first broke out to the public, instead of receiving sympathy after what she had endured, she received hate. She received many hundreds of hate calls from angry Patriots fans who were disappointed that she brought this issue to the attention of the press and the players were fined for the remarks they made. In addition to threatening phone calls, her tires were slashed and due to the severity of the threats she had to move to Australia until the civil case finally closed.

But, why is this important? This case was significant for many reasons, the first being that discrimination in the locker rooms. Although it may not be as prevalent and up front as Olson's incident was but, it still does exist. And what I believe is most significant about this story is that it shows that again, women must stick together as many reporters have said. This is because if women stick together and stand up against this type of discrimination and bring more attention to it, it professional sports leagues are more likely to deliver more severe punishments.