What Iis Riley Gaines Hiding? We Investigated.

Summary

Podcast Episode Summary

Podcast: Reveal
Episode: What Is Riley Gaines Hiding? We Investigated.
Air Date: November 26, 2025
Hosted by: Al Letson (Reveal), Pablo Torre (Pablo Torre Finds Out)
Reported by: Madison Pauley

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Overview of Main Theme

This investigative episode, a collaboration between Reveal and Pablo Torre Finds Out, takes a deep, forensic look into the rise of Riley Gaines from a decorated college swimmer to a central figure in the anti-trans movement in sports. It scrutinizes Riley Gaines's personal narrative, how her story has been leveraged in right-wing political advocacy, and what is omitted or obscured regarding the broader issues in American women's athletics. The episode rigorously fact-checks Gaines’s claims, examines the culture of women’s college athletics, and explores the significant financial and political machinery behind her rapid ascent.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Rise of Riley Gaines (02:53 – 05:14)

• Profiled as the "Regina George" of the anti-trans movement.
• Tied for fifth with trans swimmer Lia Thomas at NCAA championships, which Gaines and Trump later positioned as a watershed injustice in women’s sports.
• Donald Trump’s executive order banning trans women from women's sports uses Gaines as a key symbolic supporter.

Notable Quote:

• Donald Trump (04:42):
  "The fleague forced her to share a spot on the podium with a male swimmer who took her trophy while the media celebrated this stolen glory. ... People that aren't that well versed in this would say she was the leader. And great job, Riley. Thank you very much."

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2. The Narrative Machine—How Gaines’s Story is Framed (05:25 – 07:44)

• Focus quickly shifts from sports fairness to claims of victimization and “invasion” by trans women.
• Anti-trans advocacy rapidly influences state and national policies.

Notable Quote:

• Madison Pauley (06:43):
  "You hear it all the time... The idea that trans women are 'invading women's spaces and putting them at risk.' It's been incredibly effective. ... 29 states have banned trans women and trans girls from women's athletics."

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3. The Making of an Anti-Trans Star: Behind the Scenes at Kentucky (11:09 – 18:19)

• Examines Gaines’s college swimming career and her head coach Lars Jorgensen’s highly pressurized, allegedly abusive team culture.
• Alumni and former teammates speak candidly about the toxic environment, emotional/psychological harm, and even disordered eating, not mentioned in Gaines’s memoir.
• The contrast between Gaines’s public framing of women’s sports victimhood and the inside reality of college athletics.

Notable Quotes:

• Trinity Ward, former teammate (17:21):
  "It's like, okay, this person is one of the best swimmers on her team. And you're making jokes about her being fat... I can't think of a single teammate ... where now I'm like, wow, that person was really confident in themselves and their body..."

• Madison Pauley (18:27):
  "You wouldn’t get any of this [toxic team culture] if you read Riley’s memoir. She does call some of his comments 'utter savagery' but says it was to make them better."

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4. The 2022 NCAA Championships: What Really Happened? (25:32 – 35:48)

• The pivotal meet: Dissecting the media and political myth versus the mundane reality of the infamous race.
• Gaines tied for fifth with Lia Thomas in the 200-yard freestyle. The actual race was notably less dramatic than headlines suggested.
• Former teammates recall Gaines as dissatisfied (but not especially targeted or victimized) and note that Thomas’s locker room conduct was discreet and respectful.

Notable Quotes:

• Anonymous Teammate (35:42):
  "Any of the times I would see her [Lia Thomas] in there, she's wrapped in her towel, she's turned around, not facing anyone. I felt bad for her. ... She just wanted to come and swim."

• Pablo Torre (34:51):
  "The template for how a trans athlete is not merely someone who's going to take your trophy... They're going to be predators preying on your daughters."

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5. Explosion into Politics and Media, and the Financial Incentives (36:48 – 51:47)

• Gaines becomes a central right-wing media and political figure, appearing in campaign ads and Fox News.
• Her story is amplified by well-funded conservative networks (Turning Point USA, Independent Women's Forum, Leadership Institute).
• Financial records reveal rapidly increasing speaking fees and a lucrative career—speaker fees octuple in two years, her center at the Leadership Institute brings in $126,523 in 5 months, significant donations from GOP mega-donors (e.g., Betsy DeVos/Orlando Magic owners).

Notable Quotes:

• Madison Pauley (47:12):
  "Over the last three years speaker fees for Riley Gaines, as paid by various state and local Republican committees, have more than octupled."

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6. Legal Battles as a New Front (54:43 – 63:37)

• Gaines fronts lawsuits aiming to make trans exclusion from sports permanent, marshaled by right-wing attorneys (e.g., Bill Bock, closely tied to Trump).
• ICONS (Independent Council on Women's Sports)—a fast-growing nonprofit, now with a million-dollar budget, funds these lawsuits.
• Next year the Supreme Court will hear pivotal cases on Title IX and trans athletes—outcomes that could invalidate scores of state bans.

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7. The Real Scandals in Women’s Sports: Abuse and Accountability (66:33 – 73:20)

• Even as Gaines focuses on trans athletes, explosive revelations emerge about her own college coach, Lars Jorgensen:
  • Multiple swimmers allege sexual assault, harassment, and creating a toxic, abusive environment.
  • In 2024, two former team members file a lawsuit including accusations of rape and harassment.
  • Jorgensen is banned for life by the U.S. Center for Safe Sport.
  • Gaines issues a brief tweet expressing feeling “blindsided and betrayed” but has otherwise said very little or defended Jorgensen publicly as a “fantastic coach” even after allegations surfaced.
• The report highlights the disconnect between the right-wing narrative (which frames trans women as the biggest threat to women in sports) and the very real abuses perpetrated by (cisgender, powerful) male coaches.

Notable Quotes:

• Madison Pauley (74:14):
  "She has just been churning out all of this material about sexual abusers in sports, in her framing of it, transgender women. ... But one tweet about Coach Lars."

• Trinity Ward (79:41):
  "It's hard for me to care about Riley Gaines tying for fifth when my swim coach is accused of raping my teammates. ... People shut up pretty quickly after that."

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Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

• On the transformation of Gaines’s public persona:
  "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." – Trinity Ward (23:22)

• On the constructed victim narrative:
  "It is the story that doesn't die. … She says, 'I am in full support of her [Lia Thomas] … because there's no doubt that she works hard, too, that she's just abiding by the rules.'" – Madison Pauley (31:36)

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Important Timestamps

• Riley Gaines’s Origin and Trump’s Executive Order: 03:17–05:14
• Teammates on Toxic Culture at Kentucky: 13:24–18:19
• Media Creation of Victim Narrative: 29:49–31:55
• Locker Room Fact-Check & Fox News Narrative: 35:02–36:10
• Political Ascent and Financial Incentives: 47:12–51:47
• Legal Strategy & Supreme Court Stakes: 54:43–64:43
• Coach Jorgensen Allegations & Gaines’ Public Response: 66:56–76:31
• Trinity Ward’s Closing Reflection: 79:41

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Flow & Tone

The episode embarks with measured skepticism and investigative rigor, sustaining a tone of moral seriousness while incorporating moments of dark irony and empathy from reporters and sources. Pablo Torre and Madison Pauley’s banter keeps the narrative engaging and accessible. Crucially, the episode persists in letting primary voices—especially Gaines’s former teammates—bring depth and credibility to its revelations.

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Conclusion

Bottom line:
The episode argues that the “threat” to women's sports spotlighted by Riley Gaines and the right is a carefully constructed and financially lucrative narrative—one that distracts from more pervasive, proven harms like abuse by trusted authority figures. In contextualizing Gaines’s activism and career, the reporters ask listeners to reconsider not only the truth of Gaines’s personal story, but also whose interests are truly served by her prominence and which problems in women’s sports deserve real scrutiny.

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Last Word

"It's hard for me to care about Riley Gaines tying for fifth when my swim coach is accused of raping my teammates. ... People shut up pretty quickly after that."
— Trinity Ward, former teammate of Riley Gaines (79:41)

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[Listen to the full episode at revealnews.org for more.]

Transcript

[Madison Pauley]

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice. Make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try [e-mail], progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.

[Pablo Torre]

Hey, hey, hey.

[Al Letson]

It's Al Letson, host of Reveal. And more to the Story. This week we got something a bit different for you. We recently teamed up with the broadcaster and podcaster Pablo Torre for a special episode of his investigative show, Pablo Torre Finds Out. Pablo is a sharp interviewer. You might have caught him on ESPN or Morning Joe. He's a sports writer who brings a forensic eye to all kinds of topics. And that investigative DNA is something we share here on Reveal. The result is is the episode you're about to hear presented in full. Our colleague Madison Pauley dug deep into how right wing superstar Riley Gaines built an anti trans empire. It's about how a swimmer who tied a trans woman for fifth place became a viral figure with an outsized influence in Trump world and arguably helped reshape the 2024 election and electoral politics more broadly. There's so much surprising and new here. Madison is an amazing reporter and really brought the goods. I hope you enjoy this episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out. And we'll be back next week with a new episode of More to the Story.

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Pablo Torre]

Oh, God. Well, okay.

[Madison Pauley]

So apologies in advance.

[Pablo 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?

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Pablo 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Pablo 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?

[Madison Pauley]

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States. 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, right.

[Pablo Torre]

There, like off to the right of just the center of the frame in a resplendent white outfit is Riley Gates.

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Donald Trump]

Thank you very much. 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Pablo 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Pablo 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.

[Donald Trump]

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

[Pablo 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.

[Madison Pauley]

Yeah, she came in fifth. And in defensive, Riley games here, coming in fifth in the NCAA Division 1 National Women's Swimming championship is a big deal. If you're a college woman swimmer. It's the top meet. Yes. So People love to call 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 meat. And she famously, very famously tied for fifth with one Lia Thomas.

[Pablo Torre]

And we can go back and forth, of course, about the competitive advantage debate and the question, the science therein. 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 Lia Thomases of the world, the trans athlete, they're being victimized. Brett Favre, what do you make of all these transgender athletes? Men invading women's sports, Trans invading sports. Trans infiltration of women's sports put women in actual danger. Trans women movement is actually anti woman 100%, especially when it comes to sports.

[Madison Pauley]

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, 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 launched, we have the NCAA banning trans athletes, trans women specifically. We have the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee doing the same thing. 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 Republic Party has really banked on this issue to win elections and poured money into anti trans advertising. A lot of it about sports.

[Pablo 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Pablo Torre]

This is my kind of episode. 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.

[Riley Gaines]

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.

[Madison Pauley]

One of the two dozen people I talked to for this calls 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 fear 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.

[Pablo 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.

[Riley Gaines]

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.

[Pablo Torre]

And she's the daughter of a former.

[Riley Gaines]

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.

[Madison Pauley]

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 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.

[Pablo 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.

[Anonymous Swimmer / Teammate]

She.

[Pablo Torre]

This is a legitimate prospect.

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Pablo Torre]

There's a part of chapter one 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.

[Riley Gaines]

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

[Pablo 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.

[Riley Gaines]

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.

[Pablo 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?

[Madison Pauley]

That coach was Lars Jorgensen. 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 coach D1 in Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee, and by the time Riley got to Kentucky in 2018, 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.

[Riley Gaines]

In the beginning of freshman year, he continually addressed me as a loft. 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Trinity Ward]

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

[Pablo Torre]

But also she was brave enough to speak to us on camera.

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Trinity Ward]

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 SECA finalist, qualifying for NCAAS meddling and finaling at NCAAs, which was really inspiring to me and every person I'm talking to back home outside of spending at my school is like, you're living the dream, you know, you're living like the American dream.

[Madison Pauley]

She became a specialist in the hundred 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 right This is.

[Pablo Torre]

The guy who says, you're gonna eat light and you're gonna crap thunder, and.

[Donald Trump]

You'Re gonna crap thunder.

[Madison Pauley]

You're gonna become a. Yeah, a shit talker.

[Pablo 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Trinity Ward]

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.

[Madison Pauley]

What Trinity and her two teammates all described to me was a culture set by Coach Lars at the top that went beyond 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 and, like.

[Trinity Ward]

Seeing someone cry or just become very upset or just say, like, oh, I feel so worthless. That's really tough to see.

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Trinity Ward]

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

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Pablo 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 a. An ecosystem where there is a very powerful coach who is making them do things that they're actually not supposed to be doing.

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Trinity Ward]

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.

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Trinity Ward]

And I'm not gonna sit here and say that, like, you know, Kentucky swimming is a source of, like, all my mental health problems and why I struggled with food in college and still sometime 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.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Riley Gaines]

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.

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Pablo 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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 interview. So the university started looking into it, and after going through their process 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, things like comparing their bodies to meat, things like saying, quote, with a butt like that, she ought to be a good swimmer.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Madison Pauley]

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 decline to renew his contract at the end of the year. And, 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.

[Pablo 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, Right?

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Pablo 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, it's really clear that Riley.

[Madison Pauley]

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. 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.

[Trinity Ward]

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 and back. And we both have conservative Christian upbringings, 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, just being like, yeah, like I'm not like a die hard chomper and that really like tracked with everything, I mean, to me, like that made sense and tracked with 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 gonna hate crying me today. Or like Riley makes me feel unsafe.

[Riley Gaines]

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

[Trinity Ward]

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.

[Pablo 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 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Josh Sanborn]

This is Josh Sanborn, producer at Reveal. This episode is made possible by support from the People's Hearing. Real democracy doesn't happen in silence. Across America, communities are testifying, uniting and building the movement for change. This is the People's Hearing Tour where those most affected by environmental injustice step forward to tell the truth about their health, their land and their work, and to shape the policies that will define our shared future. Communities across the nation are bearing witness to harm and turning their testimony into a blueprint for change. Because the power of people isn't the original theoretical. It's organized, it's unstoppable, and it's rewriting the rules for justice and democracy. Join the movement. Add your voice. Visit peopleshearing.com the People's Hearing Tour. Reclaiming power, Rewriting the rules.

[Al Letson]

Okay, here again are Pablo Torre and Madison Pauly.

[Pablo 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.

[Madison Pauley]

Oh, no chance.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Madison Pauley]

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 Lia Thomas. Transgender swimmer Lia Thomas breaking barriers and records. But in a new article, Sports Illustrated calls the college senior the most controversial athlete in America.

[Pablo Torre]

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 pen swimmer Leah Thomas will be allowed to compete in the Ivy League Championships.

[Madison Pauley]

Lea 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. And 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.

[Anonymous Swimmer / Teammate]

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

[Madison Pauley]

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, and she says that the women on her team were obsessing over Thomas.

[Anonymous Swimmer / Teammate]

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

[Madison Pauley]

So was Riley part of this buzz?

[Anonymous Swimmer / Teammate]

She was being such a b tch 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.

[Pablo 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.

[Anonymous Swimmer / Teammate]

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.

[Pablo Torre]

It's the 200 yard freestyle final. But as for the races that did drop jaws over time, the race that did launch the anti trans athlete movement 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 Lia 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Pablo 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.

[Anonymous Swimmer / Teammate]

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 the 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, like, this isn't good.

[Pablo 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Pablo Torre]

Right. And so now you see the trophy. You see the focus on how the NCAA had an official that insisted that Lia 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 place Y in terms of what it felt like in her hand, she would get the fifth place trophy in the mail as. And this story keeps on getting printed and reprinted. And it's the media coverage that defined the debate.

[Madison Pauley]

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, too, that she's just abiding by the rules that the NCAA put in place.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Pablo Torre]

And after the Daily Wire, naturally, in the sequence, here comes an interview on right wing talk radio with Clay Travis.

[Clay Travis]

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?

[Madison Pauley]

Right.

[Riley Gaines (Interview Segment)]

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

[Pablo Torre]

So.

[Clay Travis]

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

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Clay Travis]

But I just wanted 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Riley Gaines]

Right?

[Riley Gaines (Interview Segment)]

I think the ncaa, you know, did make it seem like it was something that, oh, just 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 levels.

[Pablo Torre]

And so 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 going to take your trophy from you, take your scholarship from your kids. They're going to be predators preying on your daughters.

[Madison Pauley]

Right.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Anonymous Swimmer / Teammate]

NCAA's is only women's, and then 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Anonymous Swimmer / Teammate]

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.

[Pablo 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.

[Riley Gaines]

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 Jorgense in, but just speaking for them, 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.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Madison Pauley]

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 Lia Thomas. So it's just this immediate transition.

[Pablo 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.

[Riley Gaines]

I trained from an early age giving it my all to achieve my dream.

[Madison Pauley]

We see her in a campaign ad for Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul.

[Riley Gaines]

But Rand Paul is not afraid to fight for fairness for women and girls. And that's why I'm supporting him this.

[Madison Pauley]

Year in an ad for then Republican Governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem.

[Riley Gaines]

Kristi Noem stood up for us, passing the toughest law in the country to defend female sports, who also happens to.

[Pablo Torre]

Be, by the way, the now Secretary of Homeland Security in charge of ice.

[Trinity Ward]

Mm.

[Madison Pauley]

Here is Herschel Walker.

[Riley Gaines]

But my senior year, I was forced to compete against a biological male.

[Pablo Torre]

That's unfair and wrong.

[Riley Gaines]

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

[Donald Trump]

Warnock's afraid to stand up for female athletes.

[Riley Gaines]

Herschel Walker stands up for what's right.

[Madison Pauley]

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. She's really breaking through when she gets called on stage at cpac.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Donald Trump]

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

[Madison Pauley]

Riley Gaines 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, Pablo, 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 see, sit in the Kentucky legislature and say look, there is a real victim of these policies. And that's I think why her story breaks through.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah, there's 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.

[Riley Gaines]

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

[Pablo Torre]

And in each one of those cases what you see is that it's not just the Leah Thomas story from 18.

[Riley Gaines]

To 22 year old girls who were exposed to male body parts.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Riley Gaines]

Our experiences as Z1 swimmers, it's not.

[Pablo Torre]

Unique 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Pablo 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.

[Riley Gaines]

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

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Clay Travis]

And again I, I blame the, 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.

[Pablo Torre]

And by the way, and it goes on, obviously, but you can see already like this is, I mean, this is, it's just girlfriend has. I would say it's profoundly up right, like the, 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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 mostly 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.

[Riley Gaines]

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 six floor 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. Not even probably a year, two years ago, this would have been considered some form of sexual assault voyeurism.

[Pablo 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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 week of.

[Pablo Torre]

The laryng assar abuse 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Pablo Torre]

The equivalent she's making there is that Larry Nassar, again, responsible for the sexual assault and predation of more than a hundred 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.

[Madison Pauley]

And after all of this, it's Simone Biles who actually apologizes. She had gone and said earlier that Riley Gaines 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.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Anonymous Swimmer / Teammate]

Yes.

[Pablo Torre]

Yes, I do. 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Pablo Torre]

In 2024, we're seeing a $13,929 fee from the Republican Central Committee in Nevada.

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Pablo Torre]

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. Riley Gaines joins us now. Riley Gaines joins us right now with reaction.

[Madison Pauley]

Riley Gaines, she's America's number one feminist.

[Pablo Torre]

As far as I'm concerned, an ambassador.

[Clay Travis]

At the Independent Women's Forum, Riley Gaines. Riley, good morning. Thanks for being here.

[Pablo Torre]

Riley Gaines is with us. Riley, how are you? 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.

[Riley Gaines]

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

[Pablo 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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 mes of Riley Gaines, essentially.

[Pablo 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Pablo Torre]

Which is also why I can very safely declare that the family that owns the Orlando Magic are also the devices and also some of the many dollars behind the Riley Gain Center.

[Madison Pauley]

And you can see on their tax form, Leadership Institute, a hundred thousand dollars in 2023.

[Pablo 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?

[Madison Pauley]

The Riley Gaines center definitely was.

[Pablo Torre]

And so as we put these tax forms right alongside her appearances on Fox News, it is important to remind ourselves that this 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 the Major League Baseball playoff games that apparently helped turn the election in which they declared very proudly Kamala's.

[Riley Gaines]

Agenda is they them, not you.

[Donald Trump]

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

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Madison Pauley]

There is polling saying that these ads did shift voters.

[Pablo 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Pablo Torre]

And by the way, just to keep up the accounting year, the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee effectively did the same thing this summer because of Donald Trump riding this wave of popular momentum. All which is to say that as coach Lars saw potential in Riley Gaines, right, motivating her by claiming that she had a lack of 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 by so many parents and Americans who see this story through her eyes.

[Madison Pauley]

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, K12 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?

[Pablo Torre]

A new lawsuit could have a big.

[Clay Travis]

Impact on who can and who can't compete in college sports.

[Pablo Torre]

Riley Gaines and 15 other female athletes just filed a lawsuit against the NCAA.

[Madison Pauley]

She says this development was due time.

[Riley Gaines]

And that the NCAA has been served.

[Pablo 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?

[Madison Pauley]

I'm so sorry to say that it is time to listen to Riley Gaines podcast.

[Riley Gaines]

Today's guest is Bill Bach. He was an NCAA official. His story is, is pretty incredible because.

[Madison Pauley]

In this episode Riley Gaines introduces us to someone who has been dodging Mike Halls, her lawyer.

[Riley Gaines]

He's actually an experienced litigator. He has substantial experience with sports law and sports during drug testing. He was actually the general counsel of the U.S. anti Doping Agency for 13 years. He's represented clients in high profile investigations and litigation and clinical, including Lance Armstrong.

[Madison Pauley]

And after those 13 years at the U. S Anti Doping Agency, 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. Of course, this is when Trump was denying the results of the 2020 election.

[Pablo 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 like 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.

[Madison Pauley]

NCAA championships, 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.

[Pablo Torre]

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. And so as we continue to examine the grift that keeps on giving Billbox legal argument here in Gaines v. NCAA, which is filed in 2024. It does have to do with Title 9. 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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 Lia Thomas swim but also letting any other trans athlete compete in the women's division violates Title 9.

[Pablo 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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. 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. 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.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Madison Pauley]

Heard around the world. So the daughter of the swim mom, one of these Icons co founders, she had actually lost to Lia Thomas a couple times that season. So they had gone head to head. They had encountered honored 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 $100,000 organization in 2022 to. We have this one here from 2024. A million dollar organization, like 10 times.

[Pablo Torre]

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.

[Madison Pauley]

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 D.C. 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 the conservative social movement over the last 30 years in America.

[Pablo Torre]

I know I missed the Cato Institute.

[Madison Pauley]

Those were the days.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Madison Pauley]

So XXXY Athletics is a brand, a clothing brand.

[Riley Gaines]

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

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Pablo Torre]

Was going to say, if you were in the market for a T shirt that had the text of title D that we read before emblazoned across the back, we have one candidate for your money.

[Madison Pauley]

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. And this is what this whole brand is built on. And they funnel their money to Icons for some of their merch.

[Pablo 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?

[Madison Pauley]

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, at the very beginning of this movement.

[Pablo Torre]

And the lawsuits are arguing that Title 9 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 9 requires banning trans athletes. These cases argue the opposite.

[Madison Pauley]

Spin 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 going to get an answer to 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 going to 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.

[Pablo 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Pablo Torre]

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.

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Al Letson]

Okay, here again are Pablo Torre and Madison Pauly.

[Pablo 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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 Stars was complying with NCAA rules. So I got records from that investigation from the university through a public records request. 29 swimmers and seven coaches were interviewed, plus alumni wrote in. And they back 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 tell me that Jurgensen was removed from the pool deck on May 1st of 2023. In the midst of this investigation, he was prohibited from interacting with student athletes and coaches.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Madison Pauley]

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, Swim Swam, 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.

[Riley Gaines]

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.

[Madison Pauley]

And a week after we learn about this investigation on Swim Swam, Jorgensen resigns. The University of Kentucky tells me they negotiated a settlement for a fraction of his contract value in exchange for him cooperating with their inquiry. And meanwhile, back on Swim Swam in the comments section, which is pretty lively.

[Pablo Torre]

As I've learned I have heard of swim swam before. It is the place for argument, commentary, and, it turns out, tips. In a larger investigation, the stories about.

[Madison Pauley]

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. 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. 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 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.

[Pablo Torre]

What did the university itself have to say?

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Pablo 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. But the. 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Pablo 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.

[Madison Pauley]

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

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Riley Gaines]

And one of my best friends in.

[Pablo Torre]

Her best selling 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 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?

[Madison Pauley]

I found one tweet from a few days after the allegations became public and it reads in part, 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.

[Pablo Torre]

And I, 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 close.

[Madison Pauley]

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 spectrum that she puts it on. So she has this platform. She has plenty of to say on this kind of topic.

[Pablo Torre]

But one tweet, what has she said about Coach Lars since then?

[Madison Pauley]

I mean, just two months ago, on another podcast, she referred to him as a fantastic coach. There's been really very, very little.

[Riley Gaines]

And I just felt this, almost like this emptiness right there. There wasn't a lot of satisfaction in doing what I did. I had great friends at a fantastic coach.

[Pablo 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.

[Riley Gaines]

And to me, that is sexual abuse. What me and my teammates had to go through was certainly sexual abuse.

[Madison Pauley]

Again, that was on Stephen A. Smith's podcast.

[Pablo Torre]

And, and I. Look, I. I do want to say the voice that you should be listening to on how this all feels, to hold these ideas simultaneously, it's not mine, it's not Stephen A's, and it's not yours. Madison, Right. It does seem like this is why, in fact, you made sure to talk to her actual teammates.

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Trinity Ward]

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 worshiping 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, that's their dream like that, that is 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 never would have thought that this would happen. And I thought very highly of her before.

[Pablo Torre]

And so at the end here, when it comes to this question of 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?

[Madison Pauley]

I think Trinity Ward deserves the last word here.

[Trinity Ward]

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?

[Madison Pauley]

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.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Madison Pauley]

Glad to do it.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Al Letson]

Thanks to our friends at Pablo Torre finds out for bringing us this important story. And be sure to subscribe to Pablo Torre Finds out wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back next week with a new episode of More to the Story.

[Madison Pauley]

From prx.