She Deserved Better: On Rumors, Responsibility, and the Damage We Can’t Undo

By LONNIE KING

I wrote about this topic a couple of weeks ago in my Big Daddy’s Texas Sports blog, but I felt the need to add some additional perspective here. Because while the story of what happened to Mary Kate Cornett involves the world of sports, the implications reach far beyond it.

We’ve all heard the phrase, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”
Whoever wrote that had clearly never been the subject of a viral lie.

Recently, Pat McAfee—former NFL punter turned sports media megaphone—found himself apologizing on national television to a young woman named Mary Kate Cornett. She’s a student at Ole Miss. Or maybe I should say, she’s a student trying to survive a lie that went national.

Back in February, McAfee referenced an ugly, false rumor about Cornett on an ESPN broadcast. He didn’t name her directly, but he didn’t have to. His massive platform helped catapult the story into even wider circulation.

Cornett was doxed, swatted, forced into emergency housing.  The damage was real.  The trauma was lasting.

And now, five months later?  McAfee says, oops, he’s sorry.

The Culture That Laughs First, Thinks Later

I don’t know Pat McAfee personally. I don’t know if his apology was sincere or strategic. I’d like to believe he meant it. But that’s not really the point.

The point is that we live in a culture where people don’t stop to ask if something is true—they only ask if it’s entertaining. Where a person’s name, face, and reputation can be reduced to punchlines for profit. And even when the truth comes out, it’s not what people remember.

They remember the joke, not the retraction.

And just to be clear, I’m not speaking from some moral high ground. I’ve been guilty of posting memes or headlines that turned out to be false—or sharing AI-generated images I didn’t recognize as fake. I’ve pulled them down when I found out, and my “platform” is nowhere near the scope of Pat McAfee’s. But even then, I’ve caught myself wondering what potential damage I did, even in a small ripple.

It’s why I ask more questions now before I post or comment on something. I haven’t perfected that, but I’m better than I used to be.

And I think that’s part of the trap we’re all in. This era of immediately-accessible information makes it so easy to fall for the wrong thing. You see or read something that looks real. You laugh. You forward it to ten friends. Boom—it spreads.

That’s not just an industry problem. It’s a human problem.

We want drama. We want someone to laugh at. And we want to feel superior to someone who’s going through hell—because that somehow makes our own lives feel less fragile.

In this case, though, it wasn’t about painting Mary Kate Cornett as a villain. It was something more insidious: a lie that fed on lazy stereotypes that have existed for decades in sports culture—especially in places like SEC country.

The young coed. The oversexed rumor. The tired trope that somehow still finds new life in locker rooms, forums, and commentary shows.

There wasn’t a villain in the story—until McAfee accidentally made himself one. And now, some might even frame him as the hero for apologizing. That’s the absurdity of the cycle we’ve built: create the damage, then get credit for caring about it once the cameras are back on.

When “I’m Sorry” Isn’t Enough

There’s this modern impulse to think that once you’ve apologized, the slate is wiped clean.

And while forgiveness matters—while grace is real and beautiful and necessary—there’s something hollow about apologies that only come after the damage is irreversible.

This young woman, barely old enough to vote, will carry the weight of this incident for years. Maybe for life. No number of apologies or settlements will scrub the internet or undo the trauma of being mocked by millions.

We don’t talk enough about how public humiliation lingers long after the spotlight moves on.

And what’s worse, we’ve become a culture that confuses excuses with forgiveness.

We want “I’m sorry” to be the off-ramp. A tidy bow on something we’ve decided is “no big deal.”  But only for some people.

McAfee apologizes, and suddenly it’s time to move on. “He owned it,” people say. “Let’s forgive and forget.”

But when it comes to LGBTQ people who ask for equal rights, or women of color who dare to speak up for fair compensation in sports, the grace suddenly disappears. Those “transgressions” are treated as unforgivable.

We extend selective forgiveness. We offer PR redemption to the loudest voices while demanding lifelong contrition from the ones already pushed to the margins.

That’s not grace. That’s manipulation.

A Question of Character

If you’re someone who talks for a living—into a microphone, from a pulpit, behind a desk—you don’t just get to have opinions. You have responsibility.

McAfee’s fans may think of him as a loud, funny guy who just “says what he thinks.” He has no filter, and that’s a likable quality to them. 

But when you reach a certain level of visibility, what you think becomes what others absorb. That’s not political correctness—it’s moral reality.

And the harder truth is that we’ve created a society that confuses cruelty for courage. That mistakes recklessness for authenticity. That treats apologies as PR strategies instead of soul-level reckonings.

I Hope We All Learn Something

If this had happened to someone I knew—someone I loved—I wouldn’t care about the apology.  I’d care about the silence that came long before it, from February to July.

The people who laughed.  The ones who shared the video.  The ones who didn’t stop to ask, “What if this isn’t true?”

Mary Kate Cornett deserved better.  And I hope—sincerely—that Pat McAfee learns something from what he did.  But more than that, I hope we all do.

Because this isn’t just about sports or scandal.  It’s about the kind of people we’re becoming—and whether we’re okay with that.

Grace and grit to you!  — LK