Morgan Riddle, the fashion influencer and girlfriend of pro tennis player Taylor Fritz, said she spent all of Super Bowl weekend dealing with shocking levels of harassment from male football fans in Las Vegas.
Riddle made several Instagram Story posts Sunday night detailing the “extremely stressful and scary” advances made by male spectators attending the Super Bowl in person. In one, she describes how she “spent the 3rd quarter in the bathroom of the stadium because i had a panic attack” during the game.
The fashion influencer said she had been grabbed, groped, harassed, and catcalled “incessantly–basically every few minutes when we were out in public.”
Riddle, a regular at Fritz’s tennis matches, is no stranger to entering male-dominated sporting events. But she said the harassment she dealt with at the Super Bowl was unlike anything she had experienced with tennis.
“We couldn’t even enjoy the game without getting bothered by drunk, rude, gross male fans,” she wrote.
At one point, Riddle said, a man tried to use his young son as a “vehicle to hit on” Riddle and her friends. She was floored when the child tried to call out his father. “How do you think little boys become obnoxious men?” she fumed.
The NFL has long been accused of fostering sexism against women, from its repeated problems with domestic violence abuse by players to lawsuits launched by former female employees. In the run-up to the Super Bowl, plenty of fans had aired complaints about the presence of pop star Taylor Swift, who is dating Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce, saying she took up too much screen time and distracted from the game.
“I just hope any guy reading this understands the gravity of your words and actions. were all just there to watch a football game,” Riddle said.
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