What Is Riley Gaines Hiding? (PTFO Vault)

She notoriously parlayed a tie for fifth into a star turn on Fox News. Now, as MAGA's top sports troll takes the WNBA's Sophie Cunningham under her wing in the trans-athlete debate, re-visit our Emmy-nominated, six-month investigation in partnership with Madison Pauly from The Center for Investigative Reporting. Who's funneling money into the radicalization of Riley Gaines? And what's her dark past lurking beneath the surface? • Read the full profile at Mother Jones https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/11/riley-gaines-anti-trans-lia-thomas-ncaa-trump/ This episode originally aired November 20, 2025. (Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic. The views, research and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out and Mother Jones and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  So the reason you're hearing and seeing me right now is because we have a bit of incredible news to share. Our show, Pablo Torre Finds Out, was not only named one of the best of 2025 by Apple Podcasts, but our episode, "The Silent Superstar and the Rotting Apple Tree," which was, you know, the whole investigation into aspiration and Kawhi Leonard and the Clippers, was also chosen as one of Apple Podcasts' Best Episodes of the Year. You can check both of those things out, the Best Shows and the Best Episodes list, right now in the Apple Podcasts app. So thank you so much for listening. Thank you for making clear what "Apple time, Apple time" actually means. And today, you are going to find out what this sound is.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  Where's our beautiful, great swimmer? Gaines, where's Gaines? Look at, come up here, will you please come up here? Come up, come up, come up. This is a great champion.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  And she was beating everybody, and then one day she looked over and said, "That's the largest human being I've ever seen."

• 1:03Pablo Torre?

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• 2:10Pablo Torre?

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• 2:53Pablo Torre?

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• 3:17Speaker 04

  This is really cool. I've never done anything like this before. I've never done a podcast before, so.

• 3:22Pablo Torre?

  Oh, my God. Well, OK.

• 3:24Speaker 04

  Apologies in advance.

• 3:25Pablo Torre?

  No, no, no, no. So I want to explain for our audience here, let's just get into it. I want to explain for our audience here that you, Madison, are joining us from where?

• 3:31Speaker 04

  I'm in San Francisco. I'm in the Center for Investigative Reporting offices.

• 3:35Pablo Torre?

  The Center for Investigative Reporting is, of course, the parent company of Mother Jones, which is one of the most venerable journalistic institutions in America, has been that way for decades upon decades upon decades. And it's really cool to partner with you guys on a story that I have been trying to fit into our strange docket, because I think that this investigation that you did for us is the thing that has been lurking underneath the surface of like the most explosive topic in sports and politics for, what, four years? Four quite consequential years, at the very least, at this point?

• 4:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, even even more. 2020, I think, is when this all started, and it has been a wild ride, and I'm excited to dig into this part of it.

• 4:20Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, so this is, if nothing else, a profile. It's a profile of, I think, what might be the main character of this movement that has dominated American politics. So who is the face of this movement, Madison?

• 4:34Speaker 05

  Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.

• 4:39Speaker 04

  The poster child, the it girl, the Regina George of this movement is the 24-year-old who clapped longer than anyone else at a White House ceremony in February during "Hail to the Chief" as Trump walked in. Riley Gaines.

• 4:58Pablo Torre?

  Right there, like off to the right of just the center of the frame, in a resplendent white outfit, is Riley Gaines.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  She's got her real MAGA look going. She's got the full face of makeup, long, wavy blonde hair, and she's really become so recognizable over the last three years, at least if you're in the Fox News audience.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Thank you very much.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  This is a nice crowd, isn't it, huh? You've been waiting a long time for this. So have I, actually. It was so ridiculous, but here we are.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  So this is Donald Trump preparing to sign his executive order keeping men out of women's sports, a threat to defund schools that let trans girls play on the girls' team.

• 5:49Pablo Torre?

  Which means that the girls who are assembled there in the front row, wearing their uniforms and their medals, these are the people that Donald Trump and Riley Gaines are saving. They're protecting them, these victims of the trans movement.

• 6:03Speaker 04

  Right. Donald Trump is here to protect women, is the really clear message of this photo op.

• 6:09Pablo Torre?

  And for people who don't know what Riley Gaines's lore is, her origin story, Donald Trump is very helpfully here to fill us in on the injustice that Riley Gaines suffered when she was a college swimmer.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  The league forced her to share a spot on the podium with a male swimmer who took her trophy while the media celebrated this stolen glory. And Riley is just a tremendous athlete, and it was a very unfair situation. I watched it, a lot of people watched it. It was ridiculous, frankly, but I want to thank Riley. She really has been in the forefront. People that aren't that well-versed in this would say that she was the leader.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  And great job, Riley. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

• 6:56Pablo Torre?

  Riley Gaines, you may also recall from the time that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dunked on her because of the whole thing where she, you know, actually just finished in fifth, Madison.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, she came in fifth. And in defense of Riley Gaines here, coming in fifth in the NCAA Division I National Women's Swimming Championship is a big deal if you're a college women's swimmer. It's the top meet.

• 7:21Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  So people love to call her mediocre, make fun of her for coming in fifth, troll her, troll a troll, but it is a big deal to have to have swum this meet. And she famously, very famously, tied for fifth with one Leah Thomas.

• 7:37Pablo Torre?

  And we can go back and forth, of course, about the competitive advantage debate and the question, the science they're in. We've done episodes on that on this show. But the larger argument that that platform, that literal platform, became politically was even more dire, right? I mean, the claim that Riley Gaines goes on to make, that this room, that this president goes on to make, is that female athletes are not only losing to the Leah Thomases of the world, the trans athlete, they're being victimized.

• 8:07Speaker 06

  Brett Favre, what do you make of all these transgender athletes, men invading women's sports? Trans invading sports.

• 8:13Speaker 07

  Trans infiltration of women's sports put women in actual danger. Trans women movement is actually anti-woman.

• 8:21Speaker 04

  100%, especially when it comes to sports, 100%. Absolutely. You hear it all the time, the idea that trans women are quote-unquote invading women's spaces and putting them at risk. It's been incredibly effective as far as changing policy. There are, the last time I checked, 29 states that have gone ahead and banned trans women and trans girls from women's athletics. That's huge. That's obviously more than half the country. After this executive order that we just watched, we have the NCAA banning trans athletes, trans women specifically. We have the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee doing the same thing.

• 9:03Speaker 04

  It's really been a massive win for Riley Gaines and her allies on the policy side. And as far as public opinion goes, obviously, the Republican Party has really banked on this issue to win elections and poured money into anti-trans advertising, a lot of it about sports.

• 9:25Pablo Torre?

  But funny enough, like the thing that I want to do here, though, is actually introduce people to Riley Gaines. I actually want them to understand the story that she doesn't quite want to tell, but we had you investigate.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  I mean, the cast of characters we are going to encounter today involves Simone Biles, the Philadelphia Eagles, the Orlando Magic, and Charlie Kirk.

• 9:49Pablo Torre?

  Also, I have been promised spreadsheets, Madison. I've been promised tax forms.

• 9:56Speaker 04

  There are a lot of spreadsheets and a lot of tax forms.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  Get ready.

• 10:03Pablo Torre?

  This is my kind of episode.

• 10:22Pablo Torre?

  So this is also one of those episodes where I end up listening to an audiobook. And I do need to now share a bit of what I learned while listening to Swimming Against the Current by Riley Gaines.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Swimming Against the Current is about standing up for reality, facts, and common sense. It's my story of how I became a passionate advocate, not only for myself as a collegiate athlete, but for every woman whose future is at risk of being jeopardized.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  One of the two dozen people I talked to for this called sports a gateway drug to the anti-trans movement. People start getting interested and getting hooked, thinking about some of the real and legitimate questions about the science of trans athletes. But as part of digging into that, they get sucked into this online sphere and this rhetoric that this is about sports to immediately, every woman's future is at risk from transgender women. That slide, that pivot, that's what really is Riley's essence, or the essence of her message.

• 11:29Pablo Torre?

  I often think of like, politics now as just like a storytelling contest. And so when I hear the story that Riley Gaines is telling in this book, it reminds me that the most helpful thing often when it comes to a movement like this is to find a victim to empathize with. And here you have a young girl born in Nashville, Tennessee, in the year 2000.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  And I tried it all. Softball, basketball, horseback riding, track. There wasn't a sport I didn't beg my parents to put me in. I was four years old when I started swimming.

• 12:03Pablo Torre?

  And she's the daughter of...

• 12:06Speaker 02

  A former football player at Vanderbilt University who went on to play professionally in the NFL and who had multiple brothers who were also SEC athletes and NFL superstars.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  Brad Gaines is currently running for Congress, so I have to say something about this NFL superstar line. This article, which is from the Philadelphia Inquirer's sports columnist, Phil Sheridan, to make room on the roster, the Eagles waived fullback Brad Gaines. He was in his first NFL camp at 28.

• 12:34Pablo Torre?

  Look, when I eventually write my autobiography, my memoirs, I too might turn my parents into superstar athletes. I do know that Riley Gaines herself, though, was like, a seven-time state champion swimmer in high school, right? Like, she was legit. She, this is a legitimate prospect.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, she was good. She qualified for the Olympic trials at 15.

• 12:57Pablo Torre?

  There's a part of Chapter 1 of the book also where she talks about how she winds up at the University of Kentucky, where a lot of her lore took place. And in 2016, she found herself with this decision to make.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  It was time to choose a college where I could continue excelling in my athletic career.

• 13:14Pablo Torre?

  And what she describes is this very fond memory of being almost relentlessly recruited by the head swimming coach at the University of Kentucky, who sold Riley Gaines, at one point, on attending a Kentucky basketball game.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Don't judge. This was when Kentucky men's basketball was actually good and not losing to St. Peter's Peacocks. Never in a million years did I think I'd actually fall in love with the school, which, of course, I did. And that annoying coach who kept calling and emailing me, he became and still is one of my best friends.

• 13:49Pablo Torre?

  The coach that became one of her best friends, as she calls him, the relentless swimming coach that recruited her, what was his name?

• 13:58Speaker 04

  That coach was Lars Jorgensen.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  Riley calls him Coach Lars, so we can call him that, too. He was a former college swimmer. He made it to the Olympics in 1988, came back, coached D1 in Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee. And by the time Riley got to Kentucky in 2018 in her freshman year, he'd been head coach of the Wildcats there for four years. And they were doing great under him. They were, by all accounts, on the rise.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  In the beginning of freshman year, he continually addressed me as aloft. I had no idea what this meant, and I never questioned it, until one day, I mustered up the courage to ask. I was told it means "lack of effing talent." Ah, cool, thanks.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  We don't just have to take Riley's word for it, that this was how Coach Lars operated. I talked to three of her former teammates at Kentucky, two of them who spoke on condition of anonymity because they know that Riley's fans and followers might go after people. But one of them agreed to go on the record.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  My name is Trinity Ward. I swam at University of Kentucky from 2019 to 2022.

• 15:13Pablo Torre?

  Also, she was brave enough to speak to us on camera.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  Trinity started at UK a year after Riley did. And by the time she's getting recruited at UK, she's seeing its intense training program. She's seeing all the resources that the school puts into the program.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  It was really pitched as, and rightfully so, this program where, you know, you almost could have this rags-to-riches story of somebody that came in as a decent swimmer and all of a sudden, after going through this training program, dropping, you know, 10 to 20 seconds sometimes, and really just improving a lot and becoming an All-Star, making the All-American Team, becoming an SEC A finalist, qualifying for NCAAs, meddling and fining in NCAAs, which was really inspiring to me. But every person I'm talking to back home, outside of swimming at my school, was like, you're living the dream. You know, you're, you're living like, the [bleep] American dream.

• 16:13Speaker 04

  She became a specialist in the 100-meter butterfly, and this is what she trains for. And as she's really getting started, she says that Coach Lars reminded her of the coach from Rocky.

• 16:25Pablo Torre?

  Right. This is the guy who says, "You're gonna eat lightning, you're gonna crap thunder."

• 16:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, a [bleep] talker.

• 16:33Pablo Torre?

  So now we're getting into 2020, and Riley Gaines, again, is on the team at the same time. She's a year older than Trinity Ward, and it sounds like things start escalating.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  As Trinity started spending more time on this team, she said that the women's swim program revealed what she called "some darker sides."

• 16:52Speaker 02

  There definitely were some darker sides to that, like, you know, doing that, that pushing in an intense way that was not, not productive, like, full-on, you know, yelling at somebody, where it was like, hey, like, now that I'm...

• 17:09Speaker 04

  What Trinity and her two teammates all described to me was a culture set by Coach Lars at the top that went beyond [bleep] talking, beyond mercurial, the way these three swimmers talked about it, and all of them were on the team at the same time as Riley Gaines. It was a place where they felt like their confidence was destroyed.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  And like, seeing someone cry or just become very upset or just say like, "Oh, I feel so worthless," that's really tough to see. And...

• 17:41Speaker 04

  They talked about how if they didn't do well at a meet, they would be punished. They would have to do punishment swims.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Like, all the coaches left the pool deck, and we were told to just swim and don't stop for two hours.

• 17:52Speaker 04

  All three of the teammates told me stories about how Coach Lars would try to force them to practice when they had real injuries or were seriously sick. Trinity says Lars didn't believe in days off. And on the swim team, this is pretty clear that a lot of these practices that were supposed to be voluntary under NCAA rules weren't. The NCAA actually suspended Jorgensen for three years for going over limits on practice hours.

• 18:19Pablo Torre?

  The NCAA literally requires days off. There are all these rules that are strict about practice hours in season versus the off-season. But you're describing an ecosystem where there is a very powerful coach who is making them do things that they're actually not supposed to be doing.

• 18:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, and they would talk about depression being super common, a lot of behavior that looked like disordered eating. They said that Coach Lars pressured them or their teammates to lose extreme amounts of body fat, down to 10 or 12%, which can be in the unhealthy range. They said that he would make fun of other teammates for being fat. And these are, let me remind you, D1 swimmers.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  It's like, okay, this person is one of the best swimmers on her team, and you're saying, you're making jokes about her being fat and not needing to eat cookies? Like, I'm a worse swimmer than her, so that must mean that I need to lose weight, too. The way that he talked about and treated weight was just not normal.

• 19:19Speaker 04

  And they had all of this sort of insecurity that they described based on what they were going through with Coach Lars on the team.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  And I'm not going to sit here and say that like, you know, Kentucky swimming is a source of like all my mental health problems and why I, you know, struggled with food in college and still sometimes do now to this day, but I know that if I hadn't been in that environment, I wouldn't have had a lot of the thoughts or struggles that I did. I can't think of a single teammate I had where now I'm like, wow, that person was like really confident in themselves and their body. They spoke about themselves very well. I just, I can't think of anyone. And that's where it's like, this is nuts.

• 20:00Pablo Torre?

  Which is to say that this is not the way that Riley Gaines characterized her swimming experience in Swimming Against the Current.

• 20:08Speaker 04

  No, you wouldn't get any of this if you read Riley's memoir. She does call some of his comments, quote, utter savagery, end quote. But she says that this was for the purpose of motivating them, that this was just his coaching style and it was all to make them better.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Lars's goal was to enforce a positive and healthy team culture, knowing that it would in turn bring athletic success. His mindset about winning wasn't solely focused on swimming. It wasn't just about being the top swimmers in the nation. It was about being women of great character and students who excel in the classroom as well.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  Riley didn't respond to my multiple requests for interviews, detailed questions about all this stuff. Her lawyer didn't respond to my questions either. And we're going to get to what the University of Kentucky had to say about this.

• 20:58Pablo Torre?

  But this program at the time, if you go through the, just the public records here, it's not just the story of like a hard ass coach who's running things and being demanding of his players. It seems like there is a depth of the dysfunction that is also worth citing here.

• 21:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is a stack of papers from one of the investigations into the University of Kentucky swim team at this time. And it's a 2019 sexual harassment investigation, not into Coach Lars, but into his assistant coach, Chip Klein. This investigation started after a bunch of swimmers had mentioned concerns about Klein in their exit interviews. So the university started looking into it. And after going through their process, um, by what they call a preponderance of the evidence, which is basically like more likely than not, this is true. Klein had allegedly touched a swimmer's leg under her towel at a meet, forced that same swimmer to hug him before letting her enter the team room, made sexual comments about her and about other swimmers.

• 22:00Speaker 04

  Things like comparing their bodies to meat, things like saying, quote, with a butt like that, she ought to be a good swimmer.

• 22:06Pablo Torre?

  And so what is the consequence of what this investigation finds? What does the school do in response?

• 22:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. So while it's investigating, the school puts Klein on a suspension. That suspension stays in effect for the whole rest of the year. And then they declined to renew his contract at the end of the year. And at the same time, they also temporarily suspended Coach Lars himself for six days for failing to report what he knew about Klein's conduct.

• 22:33Pablo Torre?

  And so we should also say here that you requested comment from Chip Klein. And Chip Klein, the assistant in question who worked for Lars Jorgensen, Coach Lars, said in part, quote, "I choose not to respond to this request out of respect for what was supposed to be a confidential process," end quote. And I do want to return, by the way, to Coach Lars himself in just a bit here, but the question of, again, storytelling. Why wasn't this stuff in Riley Gaines's book? It raises a question of that itself being a conspicuous choice now that you see it through this lens.

• 23:07Speaker 04

  Right. I mean, it would suggest that there might be more serious problems in women's sports than trans people.

• 23:13Pablo Torre?

  The version of this story and the version of Riley Gaines, right, that continues to go viral online to the point that she is this leading figure in the Trump MAGA Republican movement. How different is the person that these teammates see on television from the Riley Gaines that they swam with back in 2019, 2020?

• 23:34Speaker 04

  It's really clear that Riley has gone through a significant evolution. Trinity, who was friends with her at the time, says that Riley in college was really different than her super Christian, super conservative public persona these days.

• 23:52Speaker 04

  And according to my 31-page timeline of Riley's life, this is 2021, after Trump left office. They took a two-hour drive together up to another teammate's family lake house.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  This is so funny looking back on. I drove a car of people and like Riley was in my front seat. We talked the two hours there, um, and back and

• 24:17Speaker 02

  we both have conservative Christian upbringings.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Like, kind of like talked about that and shared just about like dads that were definitely more like old school. And her making a comment and just being like, yeah, like, I'm not like a diehard tromper. And that really like tracked with everything.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  I mean, to me, like, that made sense and tracked with what I, what I had seen. Like Riley was a very down-to-earth, very practical person. As a queer person that swam on that team, I never was like, wow, I feel like Riley's going to hate crying me today. Or like Riley makes me feel unsafe.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  I am so grateful to see President Trump's quick and decisive action to uphold his campaign promise and protect female athletes.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  If you told me four years ago that Riley Gaines was going to be the spokesperson for the anti-trans movement, be speaking with Trump, I'd be like, what? You're crazy. Like, she doesn't even actually like him.

• 25:18Pablo Torre?

  And you know, when you hear that and you even make allowances for the fact that all of us, I assume both of us were probably different in college than we are now, right? It does make me want to really understand, like, what the [bleep] happened? The story here, like, it takes a turn. And where that takes us seems like it's worthy of, again, a return to your 31-page timeline about her life.

• 25:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, there is definitely a transformation that happens at the time that Riley graduates. There is a radicalization that happens. And we see her become someone who's unrecognizable.

• 26:12Pablo Torre?

  So I take us back now to the part of your 31-page timeline of the life of Riley Gaines, where the origin story that she has sanctioned is about to take place. Because here is Riley Gaines and here is Coach Lars at this sporting event at the crux of American politics. The 2022 NCAA Women's Swimming Championships, which is not only the most controversial sporting event in America's recent history, it's also the one that I don't think people have ever actually seen.

• 26:45Speaker 04

  Oh, no chance.

• 26:47Speaker 06

  It's the final in a women's 500-yard freestyle. And you can see and feel the tension in this building.

• 26:56Speaker 04

  Okay, so we're in Atlanta. This is Georgia Tech's pool. It's March. Outside the facility, there are anti-trans protesters because the most notorious star in women's college swimming at the time is Leah Thomas.

• 27:13Speaker 06

  Transgender swimmer Leah Thomas breaking barriers and records. But in a new article, Sports Illustrated calls the college senior the most controversial athlete in America. And tonight, controversy continues to swirl around the University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Leah Thomas, whose continued participation in and dominance of women's swimming prompted the NCAA to issue a rule change. Record-breaking transgender Penn swimmer Leah Thomas will be allowed to compete in the Ivy League Championships.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  Leah Thomas was a swimmer on the University of Pennsylvania men's team for three years. She transitioned during college and then COVID came around. She took a year off. And by the time she came back, she was eligible for the women's team under NCAA policy, which at the time let trans women compete after being on testosterone suppressants for 12 months. But there was a problem. Once she came back and started competing on the women's team, she was winning.

• 28:12Speaker 06

  I do remember, you know, as we were training for NCAA's, people being like, oh my gosh, is she going to be there? Is she going to compete?

• 28:18Speaker 04

  One of the swimmers who I talked to agreed to go on tape on the condition that we modulate her voice. She was actually there at the NCAA 2022 championship. And she says that the women on her team were obsessing over Thomas.

• 28:32Speaker 06

  Is she going to be in our locker room? I'm going to look at her when we're in our locker room.

• 28:36Speaker 04

  So was Riley part of this buzz?

• 28:40Speaker 06

  She was being such a [bleep] about the whole thing, but I just know that like her and Lars and some of the other coaches would just talk about like how disgusting it was and unfair and they just couldn't believe it was happening. And they didn't want to be in the pool or around her and all of this. Just kind of stuff like that.

• 29:06Pablo Torre?

  And so Leah's first race, by the way, was the 500-yard freestyle, which Riley Gaines was not competing in. You can actually just see Leah pulling away at the end to win this one. Not dominant, but a victory.

• 29:19Speaker 06

  It wasn't a particularly fast time to win the 500 free. It was like a notably slow winning time for the 500 free in the past 10 years. So people were like acting insane over this. Like she'd gone this jaw-dropping Katie Ledecky rivaling time, and that's just not what happened.

• 29:47Pablo Torre?

  But as for the race that did drop jaws over time, the race that did launch the anti-trans athlete movement that we've been talking about, that one was not the 500-yard freestyle. It was this. It was the 200-yard freestyle, which is where Leah Thomas and Riley Gaines are in the pool at the same time. And I just got to note that this is, in fact, Riley Gaines' best event, the one that she's most comfortable swimming. And this time capsule that we're watching here, while it is remarkable from the larger historical, sociological perspective, as a race, it's pretty uneventful.

• 30:29Speaker 04

  Taylor Ruck from Stanford is winning the whole time, wire to wire.

• 30:39Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, Taylor Ruck blows away the field, wins easily, and coming in fifth place with the same exact time of 1 minute and 43.40 seconds, as you can see on the leaderboard right here, are Riley Gaines and Leah Thomas.

• 30:58Speaker 06

  We see her time come in and we're like, okay, like fifth, that's not what she wanted, but that's the highest she's ever placed at NCAA. She's gonna be, she has to be happy. She had a time, but that's the highest she's ever gotten. And then I remember looking over and we were like, [bleep], like this isn't good.

• 31:19Pablo Torre?

  And the thing that happens next is where you begin to glimpse the familiar version of the story that we know. On the Daily Wire, which is Ben Shapiro's website, they publish an interview with Riley Gaines. And the headline of this article, Madison, is what?

• 31:34Speaker 04

  "I left there with no trophy. NCAA female swimmer who tied for fifth with trans athlete says officials put Leah Thomas ahead of her."

• 31:41Pablo Torre?

  Right. And so now you see the trophy, you see the focus on how the NCAA had an official that insisted that Leah Thomas get the fifth-place trophy to hold on the podium, meaning that Riley Gaines had to hold the sixth-place trophy, which is not as, I guess, fifth-placy in terms of what it felt like in her hand. She would get the fifth-place trophy in the mail as a result. And this story keeps on getting printed and reprinted, and it's the media coverage that defined the debate.

• 32:16Speaker 04

  It is the story that doesn't die, Pablo. You know, in that first Daily Wire article, she says, "I am in full support of her, in full support of her transition and her swimming career and everything like that, because there's no doubt that she works hard to, that she's just abiding by the rules that the NCAA put in place."

• 32:35Pablo Torre?

  I mean, what that is, is that's, that's the Riley Gaines who gave her queer teammate a ride.

• 32:40Speaker 04

  That's her. That's, that's the starting point for Riley Gaines here.

• 32:44Pablo Torre?

  And after the Daily Wire, naturally, in the sequence here, comes an interview on Right Wing Talk Radio with Clay Travis.

• 32:55Speaker 06

  We're talking to Riley Gaines, University of Kentucky senior swimmer who competed against Leah Thomas, transgender swimmer at the NCAA Championships. Riley, what is the process like? And I believe I saw you comment on this in a Daily Wire article. Do you guys share dressing rooms? Do you share locker rooms with a biological male who identifies as a woman in advance of the competitions or after the competitions?

• 33:20Speaker 05

  Right. So the meet this last week was all female meet, and so there wasn't even a male locker room opportunity because there are no, you know, males on deck. And so going into the meet, we were all curious what the situation would be. And so we were just told that we could all use that locker room, which is, you know, not a norm, sharing locker rooms like that. And so it was a bit shocking that, you know, that was allowed. That's a whole different issue within itself. And so I would say we were all extremely surprised and, you know, uncomfortable with that because there are girls who, that's not something

• 34:01Speaker 05

  they would agree to doing, you know, to consent to. And so it just seems like...

• 34:07Speaker 06

  So, so sorry to cut you off here, but I just want to...

• 34:09Pablo Torre?

  You do see a roadmap there for what the framework of this event ends up becoming.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  Right. You get Clay Travis in a conversation about sexual assault and consent.

• 34:22Speaker 06

  To build on this a little bit, so you have a biological man who is allowed to come into the locker room that you guys are in, preparing to compete, getting ready to swim, and he is using the same locker room as you guys are? And if so, what is the reaction in the locker room? Because historically, if a man walks into a women's locker room, I mean, that's a crime in...

• 34:44Speaker 04

  And you can hear how Riley's tone starts to change a little bit.

• 34:48Speaker 05

  Right. I, I think the NCAA, you know, did make it seem like it was something that, oh, just, we'll, we'll just all share locker rooms. But, you know, there are so many girls who, you know, even face, have faced sexual assault. And this kind of thing can be traumatic on just so many different...

• 35:06Speaker 06

  No doubt.

• 35:08Pablo Torre?

  The whole, like, misgendering stuff even aside, right? We're talking just about the narrative here, the storytelling contest here, and sexual assault coming up, which again, brings up this image, this template for how a trans athlete is not merely someone who's gonna take your trophy from you, take your scholarship from your kids. They're going to be predators, preying on your daughters.

• 35:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:32Pablo Torre?

  And so just the encounter, by the way, just the, the sheer interaction in the locker room between Leah Thomas and Riley Gaines. I, I do want to fact-check that.

• 35:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. So obviously, I wasn't there, you weren't there. Leah Thomas declined an interview request, understandably. Riley didn't get back to me. But I did talk to not just the anonymous swimmer we heard from earlier, but also two other swimmers who competed at the NCAAs, two of whom say they changed with Leah there in the locker room. And they were pretty eager to help me fact-check this. Riley's teammate, who we'll hear from now, refers to the locker room as the bathroom situation.

• 36:10Speaker 06

  NCAA is only women's and that it's only men's. So they open up all of the bathrooms to the athletes. So there's no men's restroom. It's just, this is the women's restroom.

• 36:22Speaker 04

  She says that in the locker room, Leah was just changing in a corner, wrapped in a towel, keeping to herself.

• 36:28Speaker 06

  We're all very comfortable being naked. People don't usually cover themselves with towels to change or like go in bathroom stalls or anything like that. But any of the times I would see her in there, you know, she's like wrapped in her towel, she's turned around, not facing anyone. I felt bad for her. I was like, she didn't ask to be put in this environment with these people and treated this way. She just wanted to come and swim.

• 36:50Pablo Torre?

  That story is not the one that we hear on Fox News. And then Riley Gaines is on with none other than Tucker Carlson.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  I have such an amazing support system at the University of Kentucky, whether that be from the athletic director all the way down to my head coach, Lars Jorgensen. But just speaking for them, it's just, it's just totally wrong. And I know I can't speak for everyone, but I am almost certain I'm speaking for a large majority of female athletes, that this is just not okay, and it's not fair. And, you know...

• 37:22Pablo Torre?

  There's the name check of Coach Lars as part of this amazing support system that she is describing.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  And really, really quickly, she starts getting involved in politics. She actually goes to the Kentucky State Legislature, trying to get lawmakers to override the governor's veto of a trans sports ban, and they do within a month, within a month of swimming against Leah Thomas. So it's just this immediate transition.

• 37:48Pablo Torre?

  And just a reminder here, we're in the middle of a midterm election year. And so now we're months removed from the NCAAs. And Riley Gaines gets put into campaign ads speaking for girls all across America.

• 38:01Speaker 04

  I trained from an early age, giving it my all to achieve my dream. We see her in a campaign ad for Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul. But Rand Paul is not afraid to fight for fairness for women and girls, and that's why I'm supporting him. We see her in an ad for then Republican Governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem. Kristi Noem stood up for us, passing the toughest law in the country to defend female

• 38:24Pablo Torre?

  sports. Also happens to be, by the way, the now Secretary of Homeland Security in charge of ICE.

• 38:29Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. Here is Herschel Walker. But my senior year, I was forced to compete against a biological male. That's unfair and wrong.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  A man won the swimming title that belonged to a woman, and Senator Warnock voted to let it happen.

• 38:43Speaker 07

  Warnock's afraid to stand up for female athletes.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  Herschel Walker stands up for what's right.

• 38:49Speaker 04

  By the way, this ad came out after allegations of domestic violence from Herschel Walker's son. Then, by the summer of 2022, I think this is when, like, a lot of America gets to see Riley Gaines for the first time. She's really breaking through when she gets called onstage at CPAC.

• 39:07Pablo Torre?

  This is the Conservative Political Action Conference, at which none other than Donald Trump personally summons onto the stage, quote,

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Where's our beautiful, great swimmer Gaines? Where's Gaines? Look at, come up here, will you please come up here? Come up, come up, come up. This is a great champion.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  And she was beating everybody, and then one day she looked over and said, that's the largest human being I've ever seen.

• 39:38Speaker 04

  Riley Gaines's timing is really good. Like, she is coming in after 14 states have already passed these trans sports bans. Like, this isn't a brand-new cause. This has already been a cause that Republican politicians have been pushing in the states for a couple of years now. It's been catching on, it's been working. But, as you know probably, like, the problem that they have is that they just don't have a lot of trans athletes to point to. There are very, very few of them. So how do you see that this is a real problem? It's extremely convenient to go point at somebody like Riley Gaines, who can say, hi, I was a victim of this, who can go sit in the Kentucky Legislature and say,

• 40:22Speaker 04

  look, there is a real victim of these policies. And that's, I think, why her story breaks through.

• 40:28Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, there just aren't enough examples of female athletes, period, who are losing to trans athletes because there aren't that many trans athletes in general. And so you get Riley Gaines testifying, not just at the Virginia State Legislature, but at the Kansas State Legislature and the North Carolina State Legislature, all for these anti-trans bills that are being, again, put in front of these voting bodies.

• 40:51Speaker 05

  The NCAA forced female swimmers to share a locker room with Thomas, a 6'4" 22-year-old male equipped with an exposing male genitalia in a room full of vulnerable, undressed women.

• 41:03Pablo Torre?

  And in each one of those cases, what you see is that it's not just the Leah Thomas story.

• 41:09Speaker 05

  Room from 18 to 22-year-old girls who were exposed to male body parts.

• 41:13Pablo Torre?

  She, this single data point, Riley Gaines, is now this avatar for all girls everywhere.

• 41:19Speaker 05

  Our experiences as Z1 swimmers, it's not unique.

• 41:23Pablo Torre?

  Who are in danger of, quote-unquote, "men", these predators in women's sports. And she goes on the road, she continues to go on the road. I mean, she's giving speeches at college campuses. I mean, it's not unlike Charlie Kirk.

• 41:36Speaker 04

  The events that she does on college campuses, some of them are actually sponsored by Turning Point USA, the conservative youth organization founded by Charlie Kirk. And they popularized the model of sending right-wing provocateurs to go speak on college campuses and then making a lot of content out of it and really trying to make, like, political hay when students come out to protest.

• 41:59Pablo Torre?

  In 2023, with the one-year anniversary of the NCAA Championships approaching now, that relatively boring race that we watched on ESPN earlier in the episode, Riley Gaines goes on the podcast of the late Charlie Kirk himself.

• 42:16Speaker 05

  The NCAA allowed us as female athletes to, not even just allowed, they encourage us as female athletes to participate in Leah Thomas's sexual arousal and Leah Thomas's fetish.

• 42:29Pablo Torre?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:30Speaker 04

  And you can hear in this Charlie Kirk podcast at this time just how much it's been dialed up, the extremism and the outward transphobia.

• 42:39Speaker 06

  And, again, I blame the decline of American men. This never should have been, you know, you should have, someone should have just took care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or 60s. Yeah, I mean, look, Thomas should be institutionalized and should be given some help, obviously. You should not be exposing yourself to other women. You're a freak, you're a voyeur, it should be illegal, okay? And by the way.

• 43:03Pablo Torre?

  And it goes on, obviously, but you can see already, like, this is, I mean, this is, it's just, I would say it's profoundly [BLEEP] up, right? Like, the way in which you're now alleging criminality, not like sports disadvantage, but like, actual criminality here from these athletes who are trying to compete.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  We have fully turned the corner here from this is about fairness in women's sports to actually starting to allege that this is a kind of sexual assault. This is some of the most, like, extreme perverse anti-trans talking points that you're gonna find anywhere on the internet. And it's moving from Charlie Kirk's podcast to around the same time, an appearance on Fox News.

• 43:48Speaker 05

  We did not give our consent, they did not ask for our consent, but in that locker room, we turned around and there's a 6'4" biological man dropping his pants and watching us undress. And we're exposed to male genitalia. And so that, to me, was worse than the competition piece. Um, not even probably a year, two years ago, this would have been considered some form of sexual assault, voyeurism.

• 44:12Pablo Torre?

  And that rhetoric there, like, the actual equating of being a trans athlete competing and changing in a locker room to some form of sexual assault, to quote Riley Gaines just then, this is how we get to June of this year, where there's this other wildly viral story because Riley Gaines decides to post to her now more than 1.6 million followers on X, the video of Simone Biles testifying to Congress about the horror of being abused by USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  I don't want another young gymnast, Olympic athlete, or any individual to experience the horror that I and hundreds of others have endured before, during, and continuing to this day in the wake

• 45:01Speaker 02

  of the Larry Nassar abuse.

• 45:04Pablo Torre?

  And what Riley Gaines posts here in this split-screen, side-by-side thing that she does on this tweet, where on the left it's the video of Simone Biles, and on the right it's a screenshot of a tweet by Simone Biles that called Riley Gaines a bully. I mean, it's just hard to evade the extreme nature of the argument that she's now officially making.

• 45:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, and Simone Biles was tweeting this in response to Riley misgendering a high school softball player. Riley's caption on that tweet was, quote, Simone Biles when she had to endure a predatory man versus Simone Biles when other girls have to endure predatory men, end quote. So when Riley Gaines is saying predatory men in this tweet, she's putting trans women in women's sports on the same spectrum as Larry Nassar. Like, that's what she's doing here. And not only is she saying that they're men, she's saying that if they participate in women's sports, that's a kind of abuse.

• 46:02Pablo Torre?

  The equivalent she's making there is that Larry Nassar, again, responsible for the sexual assault and predation of more than 100 athletes. That is very similar to what Riley Gaines experienced when she lost to a trans athlete and tied for fifth at the NCAA Swimming Championships.

• 46:21Speaker 04

  And after all of this, it's Simone Biles who actually apologizes. She had gone and said earlier that Riley Gaines's body was like a man's, which I think everyone would say that crossed a line. But there was no apology from Riley after making this comparison. In fact, she doubled down.

• 46:37Pablo Torre?

  And to be clear, like, she has access now to every rung of the media ladder.

• 46:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, to recap, Daily Wire, Clay Travis, Charlie Kirk, Fox News, all day, every day. And I regret to inform you that Riley Gaines, like you, is also a podcaster.

• 46:56Pablo Torre?

  I was worried that that connection was also going to be made.

• 47:08Pablo Torre?

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• 48:46Pablo Torre?

  So Riley Gaines, like me, is in fact a podcaster. But she is also, not just that, she is working for Fox News as a frequent contributor. She's a political figure. She's a speaker on college campuses that Turning Point USA formally hired as a contributor last year, the same year, by the way, 2024, where she became the vice chair, Madison, of something called the Athletes for America Coalition at the America First Policy Institute. This resume, this ever-expanding resume, how enriching is it?

• 49:16Speaker 04

  Okay, so six months ago, when you sent me down this rabbit hole, this is absolutely what I wanted to find out, like, how much money is Riley Gaines actually making? So I hear that on this podcast you like tax forms. I have plenty of them.

• 49:31Pablo Torre?

  That is my deviance. My deviance, my fetish is tax forms.

• 49:35Speaker 04

  I am so sorry. So the Federal Election Commission, this is, this is actually a disclosure from the FEC, I think you might have copies there, too.

• 49:45Pablo Torre?

  Yes, yes, I do.

• 49:50Pablo Torre?

  And what you wind up seeing in these documents is that over the last three years, from 2023 to 2025, speaker fees for Riley Gaines, as paid out by various state and local Republican committees, have more than octupled.

• 50:07Speaker 04

  So in 2023, we have Riley Gaines making $3,000 at an appearance in Kentucky. In 2024.

• 50:15Pablo Torre?

  We're seeing a $13,929 fee from the Republican Central Committee in Nevada.

• 50:21Speaker 04

  And then on page 45 of a filing from Harris County Republicans in Texas, this past June, $25,000.

• 50:32Pablo Torre?

  Again, more than eight times bigger than two years earlier, tracking right alongside the sharpening and perfecting of this whole trans inclusion as sexual assault argument from Riley Gaines in dozens upon dozens and dozens of appearances all over Fox News.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Riley Gaines joins us now.

• 50:55Speaker 06

  Riley Gaines joins us right now with reaction.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Riley Gaines, she's America's number one feminist, as far as I'm concerned.

• 51:01Speaker 06

  An ambassador at the Independent Women's Forum, Riley Gaines. Riley, good morning, thanks for being here. Riley Gaines is with us. Riley, how are you?

• 51:10Pablo Torre?

  But that's not all, by the way, because Riley Gaines also got a job as a spokesperson at the Independent Women's Forum in 2022, which helped her get directly involved in politics. Riley Gaines has now testified or appeared with politicians in at least 21 states by our count so far.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  I feel frustrated, I feel betrayed, I feel heartbroken, I feel demoralized that we have to be here.

• 51:38Pablo Torre?

  And on top of that, there was the grand opening in 2023 now of the Riley Gaines Center, a center which was founded at something called the Leadership Institute, which turns out to be a conservative nonprofit that has been recruiting and training right-wing activists for like 50 years. The mission of the Riley Gaines Center was very specific. It was to recruit other student athletes who had been, quote, harmed by zealots of transgender ideology.

• 52:11Speaker 04

  Part of her job, working for the Leadership Institute here, is to go give out actual medals, Pablo, literal medals with the Leadership Institute logo on them, to other girls and women who reject trans women in sports, mini-me's of Riley Gaines, essentially.

• 52:30Pablo Torre?

  And according to their tax forms, Riley Gaines, director of the Riley Gaines Center, pocketed $126,523 within just five months of her center's founding, raising this larger question of who exactly was funding this center, named after a 23-year-old.

• 52:58Speaker 04

  So they're a nonprofit, they don't have to disclose their donors publicly, but by going and pulling tax forms for other powerful conservative foundations, I was able to find one of these funders. And this one is the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation.

• 53:19Pablo Torre?

  Betsy DeVos, of course, Donald Trump's first-term education secretary, who was also a part of a very well-connected family.

• 53:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, some of the most powerful funders, some of the biggest funders in Republican politics, we should say the sister of former Blackwater founder Eric Prince. You know, her name is DeVos because she married into the family that co-founded the health and beauty empire, Amway.

• 53:42Pablo Torre?

  Which is also why I can very safely declare that the family that owns the Orlando [BLEEP] Magic are also the DeVoses and also some of the many dollars behind the Riley Gaines Center.

• 53:58Speaker 04

  And you can see on their tax form, Leadership Institute, $100,000 in 2023.

• 54:06Pablo Torre?

  The main character, the star of the anti-trans athlete movement, this avatar for the MAGA Republican effort, you're saying that that person, Riley Gaines, happens to be funded by billionaire NBA owners?

• 54:20Speaker 04

  The Riley Gaines Center definitely was.

• 54:23Pablo Torre?

  And so as we put these tax forms right alongside her appearances on Fox News, it is important to remind ourselves that this [BLEEP] worked, beyond even the whole, like, Simone Biles thing, which was abhorrent in terms of its false equivalence. I just remember the effectiveness, the normalization of this whole conversation. Like, there were the campaign ads, Madison, that I'm sure you remember, in the middle of Major League Baseball playoff games that apparently helped turn the election, in which they declared very proudly.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  Kamala's agenda is they/them, not you.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  I'm Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message.

• 55:03Pablo Torre?

  Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.

• 55:08Speaker 04

  There is polling saying that these ads did shift voters.

• 55:13Pablo Torre?

  And the NCAA, meanwhile, they did also ban trans women from women's sports. This happened the day after Donald Trump signed that executive order in front of Riley Gaines, wearing all white, at the White House, in the video we started this episode with.

• 55:25Speaker 04

  Where he says, Trump has said, it's a big reason that he won back the White House. And then he credited Riley.

• 55:30Pablo Torre?

  And by the way, just to keep up the accounting here, the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee effectively did the same thing this summer because of Donald Trump riding this wave of popular momentum. All of which is to say that as Coach Lars saw potential in Riley Gaines, right? Motivating her by claiming that she had a lack of [BLEEP] talent. She proved that she was a prospect worth investing in. She has remade American public policy in her image. The movement that she is the face of works because her story, her storytelling, is believed

• 56:10Pablo Torre?

  by so many parents and Americans who see this story through her eyes.

• 56:18Speaker 04

  We've got the NCAA ban, we've got the Olympic ban, we've got these kinds of policy changes that, you know, and this is a key point, could actually maybe be undone in the future pretty easily, you know, if we get a new president, maybe there's a new executive order, maybe the US Olympic Paralympic Committee changes its mind. So the conundrum for Riley Gaines right now is how do we make these policy changes, these trans sports bans, permanent, or at least more permanent than Trump? How do you make them apply nationwide so that no trans girl, K-12, college, even blue states, New York, California, none of them can play on a girls' team? And how do you do that permanently? Use the courts.

• 57:02Speaker 06

  A new lawsuit could have a big impact on who can and who can't compete in college sports.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  Riley Gaines and 15 other female athletes just filed a lawsuit against the NCAA. She says this development was due time and that the NCAA has been served.

• 57:18Pablo Torre?

  Gaines v. NCAA. This big lawsuit that's now winding its way through the court system, who is behind that? Who's funding that one?

• 57:27Speaker 04

  I'm so sorry to say that it is time to listen to Riley Gaines's podcast. Today's guest is Bill Bach. He was an NCAA official. His story is, is pretty incredible. Because in this episode, Riley Gaines introduces us to someone who has been dodging my calls, her lawyer. He's actually an experienced litigator. He has substantial experience with sports law and sports during drug testing. He was actually the general. Council of the US Anti-Doping Agency. For 13 years, he's represented clients in high-profile investigations and litigation, including Lance Armstrong. And after those 13 years at the US Anti-Doping Agency,

• 58:09Speaker 04

  actually not representing Lance Armstrong, taking down Lance Armstrong, this lawyer, Bill Bach, left his job in 2020 and got a new client: Donald Trump.

• 58:20Pablo Torre?

  Of course.

• 58:21Speaker 04

  This is when Trump was denying the results of the 2020 election.

• 58:24Pablo Torre?

  I believe I remember Bill Bach, who also worked for the NCAA itself. He was on this committee that handed down punishments to schools that break NCAA rules and stuff, before quitting in protest because he wrote a giant op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he accused the NCAA of, quote, "regressive, discriminatory, anti-woman policies," end quote. And it seems like the origin story for his position there in the pages of the Wall Street Journal was that Riley Gaines happened to tie Leah Thomas for fifth place in Atlanta at the NCAA Championships.

• 59:03Speaker 04

  The swimming race that started it all. And now he's working for her. Now she is his client. And P.S., he's not critiquing how the NCAA treats female athletes in other contexts. This is all about trans people.

• 59:18Speaker 06

  The NCAA has imposed a radical anti-woman agenda on college sports, redefined women as a testosterone level, permitted men to compete on women's teams, destroyed female safe spaces in women's locker rooms by authorizing naked men possessing full male genitalia to disrobe in front of non-consenting college women.

• 59:52Pablo Torre?

  And so as we continue to examine the grift that keeps on giving, Bill Bach's legal argument here in Gaines v. NCAA, which is filed in 2024, it does have to do with Title IX. This is the law from the 1970s that banned sex discrimination in American schools. Quote, "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance," end quote.

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  Riley Gaines is the lead plaintiff in this lawsuit, but Bill Bach also filed on behalf of 15 more female athletes who all have complaints about trans people. And they say that letting Leah Thomas swim, but also letting any other trans athlete compete in the women's division violates Title IX.

• 1:00:41Pablo Torre?

  Right. The way to get there is legally portray Riley Gaines as his victim and provide a roadmap for the permanent extinction of trans women, trans girls, in K through 12, all the way up to college, in terms of their ability to participate in sports. And I just have to imagine here, hiring the guy who represented Donald Trump himself, like, that cannot be cheap.

• 1:01:05Speaker 04

  No, I have a tab in my spreadsheet also called Contributions to ICONs. And this gets us to yet another nonprofit in the anti-trans movement. So ICONs is an acronym for the Independent Council on Women's Sports. And at the New York Times last year, they called it the, quote, "preeminent organization in the trans sports ban movement," end quote. This nonprofit started with press conferences, but it pretty quickly pivoted to focusing on the legal arena. It exists pretty much exclusively to fund lawsuits in the name of Riley Gaines and Company. It's got a handful of them all pending in court, all making pretty much the same argument.

• 1:01:48Speaker 04

  And ICONs is pretty interesting, too. It was started by a former champion college swimmer at the University of Arizona and a swim mom, herself a former tennis player at Stanford, who got fired up about these issues because, can you guess?

• 1:02:04Pablo Torre?

  I have to imagine a certain swim meet in Atlanta, Georgia.

• 1:02:09Speaker 04

  The matchup heard around the world. So the daughter of the swim mom, the, one of these ICONs co-founders, she'd actually lost to Leah Thomas a couple of times that season. So they had gone head to head. They had encountered each other at competitions. And so if we look at these tax forms here, what we can see, this is the 2022 Tax Form 990 for the Independent Council on Women's Sports. This one says that ICONs went from a $100,000 organization in 2022 to, we have this one here from 2024, a $1 million organization.

• 1:02:47Pablo Torre?

  Like 10 times bigger than it used to be in the span of two years feels appropriate for what we've been discussing this whole time. How many other organizations like this are in this, like, nesting doll of, like, money sources?

• 1:03:03Speaker 04

  There are so many of these groups. ICONs has really broken through, and I think that that's because they are not just a rebranding of the same Heritage Foundation, you know, conservative DC think tank. They're not a creature of that world so much as they are an outgrowth of people who are involved in women's sports, who care deeply about it, and who have gone through that process, that gateway drug, and landed on, you know, this increasingly radicalized side of the transgender athlete debate. And it's not just the Alliance Defending Freedom, like, classic players of, of the

• 1:03:45Speaker 04

  conservative social movement over the last 30 years in America.

• 1:03:49Pablo Torre?

  I know. I miss the Cato Institute.

• 1:03:52Speaker 04

  Those were the days.

• 1:03:53Pablo Torre?

  Those were the days. Instead, the donor to ICONs that apparently we know about is, is what?

• 1:03:58Speaker 04

  So XXXY Athletics is a brand, a clothing brand.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  I've been working with XXXY since they started, but it is surreal to now collaborate with them. I have my own line, if you will, with them called the Be Bold Collection. Expect some red, white, and blue for the Fourth of July. It's how we feel about the greatest nation in the world. And of course proclaiming the message that women's sports are only for women.

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  Is it sick that I might actually wear something like this if it was a different context?

• 1:04:25Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna say, if you were in the market for a t-shirt that had the text of Title IX that we read before, emblazoned across the back, we have one candidate for your money.

• 1:04:41Speaker 04

  This whole brand, if you couldn't tell from the ad, is built on arguing in this sort of glossy marketing language that trans women are men and that they don't belong in women's sports. It's the whole shtick. They have a lawsuit out there, a whole other one, saying that we have the right to misgender people. This is what this whole brand is built on. And they funnel their money to ICONs for some of their merch.

• 1:05:10Pablo Torre?

  I mean, they're all like these pretty creative instruments to funnel money towards, it turns out, this lawsuit, as well as the other similar lawsuits that Bill Bach seems to be filing. And so how, how is all that going?

• 1:05:26Speaker 04

  Riley Gaines' lawsuit just had a court decision. The court threw out a lot of it, but it did preserve some of the claims against the NCAA, including the Title IX claim. But then, at some point early next year, we have another couple of court cases that are going to be all over the news that we know about. And this is because the Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases involving trans athletes. These ones, starting from back in 2020 and 2021, the very beginning of this movement.

• 1:05:56Pablo Torre?

  And the lawsuits are arguing that Title IX and the Constitution, as a related concern, they actually prohibit banning trans athletes. And these athletes, in this case, there's a cross-country runner, a middle schooler in West Virginia, there's a college student in Idaho, also a cross-country runner. So it's the other way. Riley Gaines is arguing Title IX requires banning trans athletes. These cases argue the opposite spin.

• 1:06:25Speaker 04

  Right. Does Title IX require trans women to be banned from women's sports? Or does it prohibit you from passing those bans because that's a kind of sex discrimination? We're gonna get an answer to the, the question of whether these bans are forbidden, presumably next year, when the Supreme Court decides these cases, probably by next summer. And, you know, P.S., down in the lower courts, the circuit courts, they ruled in favor of the trans athletes. So we're gonna find out if the Supreme Court agrees. And if they do, that could invalidate all of those state laws that Riley Gaines helped pass banning trans women from women's sports.

• 1:07:02Pablo Torre?

  And so I just think of what Riley Gaines told the New York Times this summer in yet another interview that she gave. And she said, quote, "The gender ideology movement is a house of cards, and I believe it's lying on the sports issue. This will be the card that makes all of it crumble."

• 1:07:18Speaker 04

  What she's saying is that sports, the fight over sports, is the key to getting anti-trans policies passed on all of these levels, getting court wins for her and for her allies that are going to have ramifications for trans people's rights. And if Title IX doesn't protect trans people from discrimination in education, that has, like, implications for bathrooms, it has implications for school clubs, all sorts of issues around trans kids being able to go to school as themselves.

• 1:07:47Pablo Torre?

  And so now we're just seeing the logic and the incentive structure become clear, which is to say that when it comes to why Riley Gaines might have been telling this story in this way, changing it over time, apparently exaggerating the story of how Leah Thomas, inside that fateful bathroom slash locker room, had exposed her to male genitalia, allegedly, which she then went on to equate to, quote, "some form of sexual assault." The reason that all of that matters, the fact-checking of that, is because it provides the framework for keeping trans people out of not just sports, but pretty much every space in American life.

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  There's a whole other lawsuit that we haven't talked about yet.

• 1:08:32Pablo Torre?

  I, I, I, at this point, I feel like I'm the person that needs to go for a swim.

• 1:08:45Pablo Torre?

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• 1:11:14Pablo Torre?

  So we've now traced the arc from Riley Gaines, growing up, being recruited by Coach Lars, to making it to the University of Kentucky, to then feeding into the right-wing outrage machine that has completely dominated the American political moment. And there is something else that we haven't even gotten to yet that is relevant to every part of this story.

• 1:11:36Speaker 04

  So Riley's lawsuit and the other lawsuits over trans athletes, those make a lot of headlines. But there's another case that we haven't talked about. And this brings us back to Coach Lars Jorgensen. He was the one who, according to Riley's teammates, imposed punishment swims, ran them ragged. The thing is, it's not just them who have raised these kinds of complaints about Lars Jorgensen. In 2023, the year after Riley graduated, other swimmers at the University of Kentucky started complaining about Jorgensen to the athletic department. And they opened an investigation into whether Coach Lars was complying with NCAA rules. So I got records from that investigation from the university through a public records request.

• 1:12:20Speaker 04

  Twenty-nine swimmers and seven coaches were interviewed, plus alumni wrote in. And they backed up pretty much everything that my sources said about Jorgensen, from the punishment swims to the eating disorders. When I reached out to the University of Kentucky for comment, they told me that Jorgensen was removed from the pool deck on May 1 of 2023 in the midst of this investigation. He was prohibited from interacting with student athletes and coaches.

• 1:12:46Pablo Torre?

  And so Coach Lars, who, again, was one of Riley's best friends, even post-graduation, was she involved in any of this?

• 1:12:53Speaker 04

  At this point, she is deep into her own transformation, deep into the never-ending news cycle. And so on the day that the news breaks on the Swimming World Insider website, SwimSwam, that this investigation was going on and Jorgensen had been put in leave, Riley was actually testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee. She's bringing up the usual talking points about how having men in women's sports is a violation of women's safety, all that now-familiar stuff. That having men in women's sports is wrong, and that it's unfair, and it's a violation to, again, our privacy and rights to safety as women. And a week after we learn of this investigation on SwimSwam, Jorgensen resigns. The University of Kentucky tells me

• 1:13:37Speaker 04

  they negotiated a settlement for a fraction of his contract value in exchange for him cooperating with their inquiry. And meanwhile, back on SwimSwam in the comments section, which is pretty lively, as I've learned.

• 1:13:51Pablo Torre?

  I have heard of SwimSwam before. It is the place for argument, commentary, and it turns out tips in a larger investigation.

• 1:14:00Speaker 04

  The stories about Jorgensen were not just about running swimmers ragged and the kinds of eating disorder pressures that we see throughout women's sports. It got even darker.

• 1:14:15Speaker 04

  And so we find out exactly how much darker in April 2024. And that's when two people on the swim team, both of them former members of the team who Jorgensen had then hired as assistant coaches, they filed another lawsuit alleging that Jorgensen sexually assaulted them. One of the swimmers who files this lawsuit, she alleges that Jorgensen forcibly raped her multiple times between 2019 and 2023, which includes Riley's time on the team. And it says that he would tell the alleged victim he would ruin her reputation if she told anyone. The other one says that in 2022, he groped and kissed her without consent. And their complaint also alleges that he raped a third assistant coach at his home

• 1:14:59Speaker 04

  after a Christmas party several years earlier. Lars Jorgensen did not respond to questions that I sent him. His lawyers didn't either. In court papers, he said that the sexual assault claims are not true.

• 1:15:12Pablo Torre?

  What did the university itself have to say?

• 1:15:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, they said that they were not aware of the most serious allegations until this lawsuit was filed. That's a quote. And they continued and said, "UK has consistently acted upon and investigated allegations when they were known, and when complainants have opted to pursue allegations and participate in the investigative process," end quote. And they're saying this because the swimmers who filed the lawsuit say that the university had discouraged them from reporting their claims.

• 1:15:42Pablo Torre?

  Right, and the university also is saying, quote, "This has prompted an important conversation about what more we can do to ensure the health, safety, and well-being of all community members," end quote. And they then go on to list a series of reforms across campus.

• 1:15:58Pablo Torre?

  But the big question that we have worked our way around to, from where we started and that climb up through conservative politics and the top of America itself, all the way to this lawsuit here, which, as described, is horrific, is what do we prioritize and who are we protecting when it comes to the question of what women's sports should be concerned about?

• 1:16:30Speaker 04

  It's a shifting of the perspective from what you're hearing on Fox News. One of the assistant coaches who filed the lawsuit against Lars Jorgensen has since transitioned, female to male. And the lawsuit uses she/her pronouns to talk about the time period around the alleged assaults, which is why we're doing that, too. But when the case was first filed, Jorgensen's lawyer at the time brought Riley into it. He said that the allegations had been fabricated to punish Coach Lars for supporting Riley Gaines. And that lawyer, Greg Anderson, told the Lexington Herald leader, quote, "This all has to do with NCAA woke philosophy."

• 1:17:10Pablo Torre?

  I mean, look, the question of are there men who should be considered predators around women's sports? We've mentioned a couple of them earlier. Larry Nassar, being one famous example.

• 1:17:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, these are, like, fairly common, unfortunately, common types of allegations. And, you know, according to the US Center for Safe Sport, which is the organization created by Congress as a nonprofit to investigate these types of allegations, coaches are the most common perpetrators of sexual contact also. And P.S., the US Center for Safe Sport has been investigating this same case, some of these same allegations. And in early October, they ruled that Lars Jorgensen was banned from coaching for life.

• 1:18:01Pablo Torre?

  And I just cannot help but remember that this is the coach that Riley Gaines called one of her best friends.

• 1:18:08Speaker 04

  One of my best friends.

• 1:18:09Pablo Torre?

  In her bestselling memoir that came out in May of 2024. And, look, I get that this book was probably on the way back from the printer by then because the lawsuit, you know, this was all filed in April of 2024. And I want to just be realistic about publishing timelines and all of that. But when we come to this question of who are the men we are concerned about in sports who have been abusive, allegedly, and predatory, allegedly, in these spaces that we should be worried about when it comes to our daughters, our girls, our female athletes? What has Riley Gaines said about Coach Lars and these allegations?

• 1:18:54Speaker 04

  I found one tweet from a few days after the allegations became public.

• 1:19:01Speaker 04

  And it reads in part, quote, "I took the weekend to spend time with current and former University of Kentucky teammates. The general consensus is that we are disgusted, heartbroken, and ashamed to be affiliated with a program where anything like this could have been alleged to have happened. Lars was someone I trusted, loved, and respected. I would have gone to bat for him and defended him until the end. I feel entirely blindsided and betrayed." She goes on to write, "Regardless of the allegations, my stance is clear. Sexual predators should not be able to obtain or maintain a position of authority over anyone, much less a team of vulnerable, half-naked young women," end quote.

• 1:19:37Pablo Torre?

  And I just can't help but just see her stance that she's alluding to there as her larger stance, as if the two things that we've now covered here, the experience she had with Leah Thomas and the revelations, she says, she has now learned in the spring of 2024 about one of her best friends, Coach Lars, who is now this alleged sexual predator, that this all can fit together quite neatly. And it's all been consistent this whole time, even though when it comes to the number of words she's devoted to one versus the other, that actually is a race that's not even [bleep] close.

• 1:20:21Speaker 04

  I have to say, she's, I mean, she's a 25-year-old. She has this incredible public platform, but this is a lot for anyone to deal with when you have allegations against somebody close to you. At the same time, she has just been churning out all of this material, all of this content, all of this outrage about sexual abusers in sports in her framing of it, transgender women. That's the same, that's the spectrum that she puts it on. So she has this platform. She has plenty to say on this kind of topic, but one tweet.

• 1:21:00Pablo Torre?

  What has she said about Coach Lars since then?

• 1:21:05Speaker 04

  I mean, just two months ago, on another podcast, she referred to him as a fantastic coach. There's been really very, very little. And I just felt this, almost like this emptiness, right? There wasn't a lot of satisfaction in doing what I did. I had great friends. I had a fantastic coach.

• 1:21:23Pablo Torre?

  And then we're in the Simone Biles news cycle, which happened after these revelations came out. And by the way, it's really hard to overlook the fact that in all of those podcasts, those multiple Fox News appearances, where she was comparing Larry Nasser's sexual abuse to her experience in the locker room with Leah Thomas, she's very clear, it seems, that, quote, "What me and my teammates had to go through in terms of the trans athlete competition question was certainly sexual abuse."

• 1:21:56Speaker 04

  And to me, that is sexual abuse. What me and my teammates had to go through was certainly sexual abuse. Again, for That was on Stephen A. Smith's podcast.

• 1:22:05Pablo Torre?

  And, and I, look, I do want to say, the voice that you should be listening to on how this all feels, to hold these ideas simultaneously, is not mine, it's not Stephen A's, and it's not yours, Madison.

• 1:22:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:22:20Pablo Torre?

  It does seem like this is why, in fact, you made sure to talk to her actual teammates.

• 1:22:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, Trinity Ward, if you'll remember the teammate who went on the record with us. She had been so thrilled to be a part of the University of Kentucky swim program. But then Coach Lars changed her view of that. And she has so little respect for what Riley has spent her time doing since graduation.

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  I don't think that what Riley Gaines does deserves to be called advocacy. When we think of advocacy, we think of people that are campaigning, fighting for a better future. And normally, the word that comes to mind when you think of advocacy is inclusion, not exclusion. If you told most people, all you have to do is make hateful statements on the internet, post some ad brands, and you're going to have half the country worshipping you and hanging up your picture on their daughter's wall, saying you're an American hero, and you're going to never work a real job the rest of your life. I mean, most people,

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  that's their dream. Like, that, that is the, the easy way, in some ways, like really the easy way out. I can't think of anything else besides money and fame that would cause the dramatic transformation in Riley that I've seen. Because like I said, I, I never would have thought that this would happen. And I, I thought very highly of her before.

• 1:23:51Pablo Torre?

  And so at the end here, when it comes to this question of like, how do you tell the story then of Riley Gaines in this context and this movement in this context and these allegations in this full context? Is there a summary that you can provide us that we can take with us just to remember, like, what's actually the real story here?

• 1:24:17Speaker 04

  I think Trinity Ward deserves the last word here.

• 1:24:22Speaker 02

  When I wear my UK swimming gear, I've had three times where somebody's approached me and asked me about Riley Gaines. And I've said, well, do you know about Lars Jorgensen?

• 1:24:31Speaker 04

  And the answer is always no. And she says, quote, "It's hard for me to care about Riley Gaines tying for fifth when my swim coach is accused of raping my teammates." And people shut up pretty quickly after that.

• 1:24:45Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. Madison Pauly, thank you so much for finally helping us tell this story.

• 1:24:53Speaker 04

  Glad to do it.

• 1:25:02Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.