“Threatening and vile” – ESPN reporter Leah Hextall recalls details of ‘sexist’ messages received during first NHL season
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Leah Hextall
Leah Hextall is the first woman to call play-by-play for a nationally televised NHL game as part of Sportsnet’s first all-female broadcast team. The ESPN reporter recounted her days when she became a victim of receiving threatening and vile messages during her first year as an NHL broadcaster.
She was the first woman to call the NCAA men’s hockey title game for ESPN in 2019. She noted time and again how she loves and enjoys her job, to The Athletic’s Sean Fitz-Gerald, but also pointed out that it’s an industry that needs to be changed. Hextall joined the crew last year after ESPN struck a 7-year deal to cover the streaming, media, and television rights of the sports.
Leah Hextall talks to Sean Fitz-Gerald revealing her experience with ‘sexist’ messages
Though she was overjoyed with her new job role, many people didn’t welcome her to the field. Hextall told how her social media got poured with criticism and abusive messages, and it reached its peak that she didn’t even imagine in her decade-plus career in sports media.
She described the messages to The Athletic as “Vile. Sexist. Misogynistic. And threatening.” At a conference hosted by The Coaches Site, Leah Hextall shared her experience in the industry. She noted one of the messages in particular that she received during the playoffs. The message was sent to her email rather than on social media, according to Fitz-Gerald.
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Hextall reiterated the message to the audience, “It said, ‘You live in Winnipeg. It wouldn’t be very hard to track you down”. “‘And when I’m done with you, I will then put a gun in your mouth and blow out your brains so no one has to hear you call a hockey game again.’” “That’s not one time. I have a full folder.” She only showed this message to her sister and decided to delete it rather than reporting it.
Later she told Fitz-Gerald, “I love my job, and I love what I was doing, but it was very difficult this year. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t showing up to the rink and feeling like I was working in a candy store like it usually would when I cover hockey. … There was a lot of, more than anything, mental gymnastics to go through. There was a lot of criticism—not just within the social media audience, but also within the brethren of hockey—that I was not used to facing. And a lot of it seemed to stem from my gender.”
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Kaushani Chatterjee
(2161 Articles Published)