Video footage of a traffic stop shows Dianna Russini, a former star N.F.L. reporter for The Athletic, trying to impress a New Jersey police officer by flaunting her proximity to prominent figures in the league.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is your team?\u201d Ms. Russini asks the officer, who pulled her over after he observed her using her phone while driving.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a Vikings fan, unfortunately,\u201d the officer, from the Ridgewood, N.J., force, replies.<\/p>\n
Ms. Russini then reaches for her phone and raises an index finger while giving the officer a look. She appears to be searching for something on her phone.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet\u2019s see it,\u201d the officer says.<\/p>\n
She turns her phone in his direction to show him what appears to be an exchange of text messages. \u201cCan you see the name?\u201d she asks.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, my God, K.O.C.?\u201d the officer says, repeating a nickname for Kevin O\u2019Connell, the head coach of the Minnesota Vikings. Ms. Russini then tells him that, in her opinion, the team\u2019s quarterback \u201csucks.\u201d<\/p>\n
She didn\u2019t get a ticket that day.<\/p>\n
The officer\u2019s body-worn camera footage \u2014 first reported on Monday<\/a> by Adam Herbets, an investigative reporter for The Center Square, and later obtained by The New York Times \u2014 captured an interaction on Jan. 19 that bears similarities to a story Ms. Russini told when she was a guest on a radio show and podcast in February. However, on that show, Ms. Russini described placing a call to an N.F.L. coach who then vouched for her to the police officer.<\/p>\n \u201cI FaceTime the head coach,\u201d Ms. Russini said on the show, \u201cStugotz and Company<\/a>,\u201d without naming which coach. \u201cHead coach is in his office. He said, \u2018What\u2019s up?\u2019 I go, \u2018I just got pulled over, and I just wanted you to meet my friend, Officer Joe.\u2019\u201d Ms. Russini said that the coach helped her get out of the ticket by telling the officer, \u201cYou should let her go, she\u2019s a good citizen.\u201d<\/p>\n That anecdote was featured prominently in a Times article<\/a> last week that examined Ms. Russini\u2019s career and her breakup with The Athletic, a sports publication owned by The New York Times Company, after photographs published in The New York Post<\/a> seemed to suggest that she had a close personal relationship with the New England Patriots head coach, Mike Vrabel.<\/p>\n It was not certain whether the January traffic stop was the same incident that Ms. Russini described in detail on the podcast. Ms. Russini did not respond to a request for comment or respond to a text message from a reporter asking specifically if the traffic stop seen on the police video was the same as the traffic stop she discussed in detail on the podcast. (Jon Weiner, the radio and podcast host known as Stugotz, also did not respond to a message seeking comment.)<\/p>\n In both the video footage and the story she told on the podcast, she described being on her phone because she was reporting on the firing of Buffalo Bills head coach Sean McDermott, which was first reported the morning of the stop. And in both cases, Ms. Russini shows off her access to the coach of the officer\u2019s favorite team, and then avoids a citation.<\/p>\n \u201cListen, I\u2019m going to cut you a break on the cellphone,\u201d the officer says near the end of the video. \u201cI understand your job requires you to be on the phone a lot. Just try to wait until you get home, OK?\u201d<\/p>\n He added: \u201cKeep me up-to-date on the Vikings, OK? Let me know if K.O.C. is going to get a new quarterback.\u201d<\/p>\n In a statement posted online on Monday, Chief Forest Lyons of the Ridgewood Police Department said that the officer who pulled over Ms. Russini used his discretion in deciding to give her a warning instead of a ticket, in line with the village\u2019s \u201ccommunity-oriented policing\u201d guidelines.<\/p>\n No footage of another traffic stop involving Ms. Russini has yet surfaced. Mr. Herbets, the journalist, said he sent records requests last week to 20 police departments near Wyckoff, N.J., where Ms. Russini lives.<\/p>\n On \u201cStugotz,\u201d Ms. Russini said she had been pulled over twice in a month with her children in the car. The first time, she said, one of her sons was \u201cscreaming in the back,\u201d and the officer felt badly for her, letting her go without a ticket. The second time, she told the host, was the day that Mr. McDermott was fired and that she FaceTimed a head coach. (The whole interior of Ms. Russini\u2019s car is not visible in the footage of this stop on Jan. 19, but neither she nor the officer are seen interacting with or referencing children.)<\/p>\n \u201cI was desperate,\u201d she said to the radio host, explaining why she had tried to impress the officer with her connection. \u201cI was. I don\u2019t want to get a ticket.\u201d<\/p>\n Kelly McBride, the chair of the Newmark Center for Ethics at the Poynter Institute and a former ombudswoman at ESPN, told The Times last week that calling a head coach to help get out of a ticket would have been abuse of Ms. Russini\u2019s access. On Tuesday, Ms. McBride noted the difference between the story Ms. Russini told on the podcast \u2014 in which she describes calling a coach \u2014 and the story told by the footage, in which she seems to show off her messages to a coach on her phone screen.<\/p>\n \u201cNot only did Russini brag about abusing her insider access for personal gain; if these incidents are one and the same, she apparently embellished the story to the point of fabrication, which is alarming behavior for a journalist,\u201d Ms. McBride said in an email.<\/p>\n The police body-camera footage also raises questions about Ms. Russini\u2019s handling of her communications with sources. After explaining to the officer that Mr. McDermott had been fired from the Bills, Ms. Russini pointed to her phone and said that she had been talking with Brian Daboll, the former head coach of the New York Giants.<\/p>\n \u201cDo you know who I was on the phone with?\u201d she said. \u201cBrian Daboll. He wants the job,\u201d she said, referring to Mr. McDermott\u2019s former position.<\/p>\n A spokeswoman for the Tennessee Titans, who hired Mr. Daboll as offensive coordinator, did not return a request for comment.<\/p>\n A spokesman for the Minnesota Vikings did not respond to a request for comment about Ms. Russini showing off texts with the person the officer described as \u201cK.O.C.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked about the new footage, Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for the Times Company, referred reporters to an earlier statement in which she characterized the story that Ms. Russini told on \u201cStugotz\u201d as \u201cunacceptable conduct.\u201d<\/p>\n In April, after photos of Ms. Russini with Mr. Vrabel were published by The New York Post, The Athletic began an investigation of her work. Ms. Ha said Tuesday that the publication\u2019s investigation \u201cis still ongoing.\u201d<\/p>\n The Times\u2019s article last week about Ms. Russini noted her former stature at The Athletic. She served as \u201csenior N.F.L. insider,\u201d effectively making her the Times Company\u2019s top reporter on the country\u2019s most popular sports league. She was also highly paid relative to other journalists at the company, with a salary of close to $800,000, according to a former manager who had knowledge of her salary negotiation.<\/p>\n In the traffic stop footage, captured less than three months before the photos of Ms. Russini with Mr. Vrabel made headlines, the officer asks whom she reports for.<\/p>\n \u201cI work for The Athletic,\u201d she tells him, \u201cwhich is like The New York Times.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Video footage of a traffic stop shows Dianna Russini, a former star N.F.L. reporter for The Athletic, trying…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":773037,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[436],"tags":[274250,49,48,274247,274246,40202,527,274357,5459,19826,1718,23762,5852,274248,40428,514,274356,329,6975,274358,274245,82,40201,23052],"class_list":["post-773036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-athletic-media-co","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-coaches-and-managers","tag-dianna","tag-downloads-and-streaming","tag-football","tag-kevin-1985","tag-mike","tag-national-football-league","tag-new-england-patriots","tag-new-york-post","tag-new-york-times-company","tag-news-and-news-media","tag-newspapers","tag-nfl","tag-oconnell","tag-podcasts","tag-police","tag-ridgewood-nj","tag-russini","tag-sports","tag-video-recordings","tag-vrabel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=773036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/773037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=773036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=773036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=773036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}