Charly Arnolt felt ‘stifled’ at ESPN, blasts network’s transgender athlete coverage

After departing ESPN for OutKick this week, Charly Arnolt had some strong words for her former employer during a Fox News appearance.

Arnolt, who previously worked as a backstage interviewer for WWE under the name Charly Caruso, had been with ESPN since 2018, where she co-hosted the weekly sports debate podcast First Take, Her Take. Earlier this week, Arnolt joined Fox News’ America’s Newsroom to discuss making the jump from ESPN to OutKick and cited what she feels is a contradiction in her former employer’s ‘stick to sports’ policy. Fox is the parent company of OutKick.

“ESPN has been very adamant about keeping politics out of their programming,” Arnolt said. “Yet you just saw, late last month, they did a whole tribute, during Women’s Month, for Lia Thomas. Therefore, it doesn’t exactly seem like they are keeping politics completely out of the mix.”

Thomas is a transgender athlete and former swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania who competed against women. Recently, multiple ESPN personalities weighed in on the transgender athlete debate, opposing transgender athletes competing against women in sports. Arnolt applauded them during her Fox News appearance.

“I have to commend these two women for standing up for these women,” Arnolt said, referring specifically to ESPN’s Sage Steele and Sam Ponder for speaking out against transgender athletes competing against women. “Who are unfortunately losing so much of the success that they worked so hard for.”

ESPN has not publicly reprimanded any of its employees for either opposing the network’s decision to celebrate Lia Thomas or speaking out against transgender athletes. Arnolt did not state she was denied the ability to join Steele and Ponder in similarly sharing her opinion on transgender athletes while at ESPN.

“I’m a very opinionated person — I always have been,” Arnolt continued during her Fox News appearance. “That’s something I really love about myself and I just felt like at ESPN I was a little bit stifled. There was a lot of conversations and issues that have really just permeated the world of sports and really just society in general that I was not able to speak up about.

“And it made me very uncomfortable, because I felt like I wasn’t being true to myself. Then there’s a place like OutKick, that really, the idea of cancel culture does not exist. You have a guy like Clay Travis who really stands behind everyone who works at the company.”

ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro did attempt to implement a sort of ‘stick to sports’ mandate in 2018 after believing the company didn’t strive to serve the sports fan enough. At its core, however, the topic of transgender athletes is more a debate of social inclusion and equality than politics. But it has been the source of a growing partisan divide in recent years.

Prior to implementing a ‘stick to sports’ policy, ESPN was criticized for being too political. That’s a narrative the network continues to face, despite personalities leaving for outlets that will allow them to be more political.

Arnolt is not the first person to leave ESPN citing a desire to speak more freely on social or political issues. Dan Le Batard famously sought freedom from the establishment when he left to launch Meadowlark Media, and has since claimed Stephen A. Smith is the only ESPN personality who has been granted autonomy to address any topic on any platform.

[Fox News]