Former ESPN employee torches network over Lia Thomas tribute

An American sports personality has laid the boots into a former employee after they delivered a tribute to transgender athlete Lia Thomas.

Charly Arnolt is speaking out about her former employer, ESPN.

Arnolt, who also previously worked in WWE as a backstage interviewer under the name Charly Caruso, announced earlier this week that she was leaving ESPN for OutKick, the NY Post reports.

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Arnolt went on “America’s Newsroom” on Fox News on Thursday and explained why she thinks there is a contradiction in her former employer’s stated policy of staying out of politics.

Arnolt also applauded her former colleagues Sage Steele and Sam Ponder for opposing Lia Thomas and other transgender athletes competing in women’s sports.

“ESPN has been very adamant about keeping politics out of their programming, yet you just saw, late last month, they did a whole tribute, during Women’s Month, for Lia Thomas,” Arnolt said.

“Therefore, it doesn’t exactly seem like they are keeping politics completely out of the mix. But, I have to commend these two women for standing up for these women who are unfortunately losing so much of the success that they worked so hard for.”

Thomas swam for three years at Penn as a male, then transitioned to female and set a number of records.

Lia Thomas dominated the pool. (Photo by Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

OutKick was acquired by Fox Corp. in 2021.

After former Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines slammed a proposal from the Biden administration to bar blanket bans against transgender youth athletes, Ponder, the host of ESPN’s “Sunday NFL Countdown” tweeted, “This would take away so many opportunities for biological women and girls in sports. It is a shame that we are needing to fight for the integrity of Title IX in 2023 and the reason it was needed in the first place.”

Steele, a “SportsCenter” anchor, tweeted, “This is heartbreaking, maddening, and really difficult to watch. I keep thinking I’m going to wake up and be relieved that this was all just a ridiculous, comical, nonsensical dream….”

On her Fox News appearance, Arnolt intimated that the Thomas situation should be a warning shot about what happens if transgender athletes compete against women in physical team sports.

“I think there’s a lot of women who are uncomfortable about standing up for women’s rights because they don’t want to be considered politically incorrect, because it’s really crazy where this world and this conversation has gone,” Arnolt said.

“It’s a very slippery slope, because when you look at, this is swimming, where we’ve seen a transgender permeate the women’s world, but there are so many sports that are far more aggressive than swimming, that are team sports. Think about soccer or basketball. [If] even an average male athlete enters that world, what’s gonna happen to women? It will become a very dangerous landscape.”

Asked why she left ESPN, Arnolt said, “I’m a very opinionated person — I always have been. That’s something I love about myself and I just felt at ESPN that I was a little bit stifled. There was a lot of conversations and issues that have really just permeated the world of sports and society in general that I wasn’t able to speak up about.

“And it made me feel very uncomfortable, because I wasn’t true to myself. Then there’s a place like OutKick, where the idea of cancel culture doesn’t exist. You have someone like Clay Travis who really stands behind everyone who works at the company and says, ‘You can say whatever you want as long as you are convicted in what you’re saying and you really believe in it you have nothing to worry about.’”

This article originally appeared on the NY Post and was reproduced with permission.

Originally published as Former ESPN employee torches network over Lia Thomas tribute