Dianna Russini Makes Debut on New Show 7 Months After Mike Vrabel Photo Scandal
· Yahoo Sports
Credit: BET
NEED TO KNOW
- Dianna Russini talked about her newfound “perspective” on the first episode of her show, The Russini Report, on Wednesday, Nov. 11
- The show marks Russini’s return to sports media after resigning from The Athletic in April, following her photo scandal with Patriots coach Mike Vrabel
- Russini told PEOPLE in her first interview since the scandal that she’s “not scared to get back in because I know the people that I cover are welcoming me back with open arms”
Dianna Russini made her official return to sports media with the debut episode of her new show, The Russini Report.
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On the first episode of her new BetUS TV show on Wednesday, Nov. 11, Russini, 43, began the show with a “personal note” touching on her months away.
“Over the last few months, I have had a lot of time to think about my life and my priorities and the person that I want to be moving forward, and being home in New Jersey with my husband and our two little boys and being truly present, it gave me so much perspective that I didn’t even know I needed,” Russini said.
The show’s premiere comes seven months after she resigned from The Athletic due to paparazzi photos of her and New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel embracing and holding hands at an Arizona hotel that were published by Page Six, along with photos of the pair in an N.Y.C. bar in 2020 and renting a boat in Tennessee in 2021.
Dianna Russini on ‘The Russini Report’Credit: BET
Russini told PEOPLE in an exclusive interview two days before the premiere that the show is “about everything I know that’s going on in the NFL, along with a lot of my opinions,” describing the latter as “something I wasn’t really allowed to do before.”
The show’s premiere did not go off without a hitch, though, and technical difficulties delayed the start by close to 45 minutes. Bet US said the “record-breaking audience” broke the livestream. Once on air, Russini talked about the NFL trade deadline and talked with SiriusXM host Damon Amendolara, Philadelphia radio host Spike Eskin and former NFL coach Bill Parcels.
Speaking to PEOPLE ahead of the premiere, Russini said she was “very excited” for this new chapter, but the photo scandal was “a nightmare” for her. “The best way to describe what the last six months were like for me is heartbreaking.”
Both Russini and her husband, Kevin Goldschmidt, both deleted their X accounts following the scandal. “The lies became so out of control,” Russini claimed.
“This was a runaway train, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Once we realized nothing was going to stop this, it became unhealthy for us to read it because it wasn’t helping us heal. It was piling on and adding to what we were already dealing with.”
Yet, she said she felt a lot of support from people around the NFL. “The absolute best part of this situation has been the loyalty the NFL has shown me. They checked in with me almost daily while I wasn’t working to make sure that I was staying connected to football, to check on me as a person and to just see how I was doing,” Russini told PEOPLE.
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She recalled, “I felt like players were texting and calling me to say, ‘Get back to work, it’s time,’ and added, “I think it’s pretty poetic that here I was all these years telling the story about these players going through adversity, and then they became sort of the people that I was learning from during this.”
Read the original article on People