On Saturday, Barstool Sports president and short-tempered Adderall pill Dave Portnoy posted a video of one of his employees, Adam Smith, naked in the shower. Portnoy published the video to Twitter and then deleted it because, he said, Smith “cried like a baby about his dick being on the internet.”
Interactions between Barstool employees, who are stars in their own shitty reality show more than they are writers or bloggers, are always layered in kayfabe, but Smith seemed to be genuinely upset by the incident:
On Monday, Portnoy’s decision to post a video of one of his subordinates in the shower was discussed on Barstool’s daily web show (the conversation begins at the 15:26 mark here). Watching the whole thing might put bruises on your brain, so I’ve condensed the relevant parts for you here.
Apropos of nothing, Portnoy brought up the drama and referred to it as “Dickgate.” Smith was still very mad about it and asked about talking to an HR representative. Dan Katz, who once told a Barstool intern that two other Barstool employees were in a “race to see who could fuck her first,” asked Smith if his “dick was out” in the video. Smith said, “It doesn’t matter if my dick was out. I was in the shower!” Kevin “KFC” Clancy, an employee whose decision to cheat on his pregnant wife was recently dubbed “KFC Gate” by Portnoy, granted that Portnoy probably didn’t need to “barge in” while Smith was in the shower.
“That legitimately was, like, a violation,” Smith said, adding if this had happened to a woman it would have been “World War fucking a million.”
Portnoy countered, arguing that filming one of his employees in the shower was done in the name of “content.”
“So where does the content end?” Smith said. “I don’t want to get videotaped in the shower. I don’t understand why that’s, like, wrong.”
“We’ll put the shower video in this so you can see how crazy he is,” Portnoy said. “Everyone single person here is like, ‘Smitty is an insane person for being mad about it.’” Katz joked about Smith suing the company and Portnoy implied Smith would be too stupid to sue someone.
Barstool CEO Erika Nardini has repeatedly and recently stressed that the company—which recently asked a potential employee to sign away their right to be offended by certain things—has a “zero tolerance policy” for harassment in the workplace. I asked her if a boss filming his employee naked and posting it on the internet would qualify as harassment. She hasn’t answered. I put the same question to Mike Kerns, head of digital for the Chernin Group, which owns Barstool and recently invested another $15 million in the company. He hasn’t answered.
So that’s the latest on these fucking morons.