When Nadia Rawlinson came to be a co-owner of the Chicago Sky, Chicago's WNBA franchise, in 2023, she said her corporate career made her empathetic to the experiences of many players on the team.
"I'm an African-American woman who has been an executive in the private sector for my entire career [and] recently came into sports ownership about four or five years ago," said Rawlinson, who is also chairman of the team. "And so just being a 'lonely only' in the worlds that I'm in and excelling at the highest levels in corporate America and in sitting in public and private boardrooms, I instinctually understand that experience."
That background, Rawlinson said, also meant she understood at a personal level what her players were going through when they started to become targets of ugly, and sometimes frightening, online abuse.
"When our players were telling us this is what they're seeing, I believed them because it was very much related to how I experience my own life," she said.
As the WNBA heads into the final weeks of its regular season, outsiders continue to bombard the league with stunts aimed at inflaming division over culture war issues.
The soaring popularity in women's basketball in recent years has made it an alluring platform for bad faith actors to raise their personal profiles and stoke political tensions. Increasingly, players across the league have raised the alarm that they have been inundated with targeted abuse, harassment and threats – both online and offline. The WNBA has taken some measures, such as launching a "No Space for Hate" campaign in 2025 and offering players an AI-driven service that deletes toxic social media comments. But the Chicago Sky is taking its protective measures a step further — by enlisting help from national security experts.
"It's just become a new world that we have to operate in, that we need to figure out, how do we combat this level of abuse and harassment," said Rawlinson.
According to Rawlinson, the Chicago Sky is the first WNBA franchise to partner with American University's PERIL, the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab; and with the threat intelligence company Moonshot. PERIL, which describes its work as "preventing radicalization to violent extremism by strengthening community resilience," has developed educational materials around identifying and countering misogyny in the game. The team hired Moonshot to monitor online threats against its players – using tools that Moonshot developed a decade ago for national security purposes.
"It says a lot that here we are, 10 years later, taking that same technology, the methodologies that we use to help governments counter terrorism and other targeted violence, and we are now having to apply it to sports entertainment," said Elizabeth Neumann, chief strategy officer at Moonshot.
A vibe shift as a league's popularity soars
At a Sky game against the Connecticut Sun in late July, the energy at Wintrust Arena in Chicago was electric. The team's official drumline, The Pack, pounded on illuminated drums during quarter breaks, while Skye, the team's sassy, blue-haired lioness mascot, jumped onto the T-shirt cannon to launch souvenir merchandise high into stadium seats. Fans of both teams cheered and groaned as their favorite players' fortunes fluctuated.
"After I attended my first WNBA game as a fan, I shifted my entire career because I loved the vibe at the games so much," said Frankie de la Cretaz, an independent journalist whose work focuses on the intersection of sports and gender and the author of the Out of Your League newsletter. "It was the most positive sporting experience I had ever had as a fan."
Before that fateful game in 2017, de la Cretaz was a men's sports reporter. They said that the culture of the WNBA at that time was uniquely welcoming and supportive. Historically, most players in the WNBA have been Black. Some players are openly lesbian, and some are masculine-presenting. At the time, de la Cretaz said these differences were non-issues. Even instances of heckling at games – over performance on the court – felt good-natured, rather than insulting.
But de la Cretaz said that in 2024 there was a change.
That was the rookie season for two of the league's biggest players, Indiana Fever's Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, who was then with the Chicago Sky. De la Cretaz said that a media-manufactured narrative of rivalry between the two players, as well as the league's own promotion of Clark, contributed to a shift in the fan environment.
"Caitlin Clark was promoted as what we call 'Great White Hope'," de la Cretaz said. "Sports leagues really love to attach themselves, particularly in women's sports, to a white player who is traditionally feminine and straight, as the person that can be the 'face of the league.'"
NPR reached out to media representatives of the NBA, which handles some business operations for the WNBA, for comment. They did not respond.
Reese, who is Black, became one of the most targeted players receiving online threats and abuse. De la Cretaz said the racism ratcheted up against other players across the league, as well. They recalled attending a match between the Connecticut Sun and the Indiana Fever in the first round of the playoffs that year, where some people in the audience were jeering Sun players in ways that were blatantly racist.
"My partner at one point had to lean forward and say, 'What you're saying is racist,' to the man in front of us," de la Cretaz recalled. "The game environment was actually so uncomfortable … we almost left early because it didn't feel safe. The crowd felt kind of like they would riot if the Fever won or lost. The vibe was just really, really different."
Misogyny: a "Trojan horse" to other forms of hate
Last week, provocateurs threw sex toys onto the courts at games in Chicago and Los Angeles. Days later, a former NBA player who has used the WNBA as a vehicle for anti-trans advocacy was ejected from a Chicago Sky game, after engaging in an altercation with team guard Natasha Cloud. The incidents relate to controversy around the eligibility of transgender women to play in the league, even though the WNBA does not have, nor has it ever had, players who are transgender women.
For Cynthia Miller-Idriss, founder of PERIL, the dangers that WNBA players face stem from the same source that fuels violence of every type: misogyny. Miller-Idriss's new book, Man Up: The New Misogyny & The Rise of Violent Extremism, delves into this link.
"[Misogyny] is one of the biggest common denominators in gang violence, in stalking harassment of athletes, in gender disinformation campaigns against politicians, and in school shootings and other acts of mass violence, terrorism and targeted violence," Miller-Idriss said. "Sixty percent of mass shooters in the U.S. going back to 1949 have a documented criminal history of domestic and intimate partner violence."
Miller-Idriss said that she was shocked to uncover some of these statistics in the course of doing research – even though she has worked in the field of violent extremism for decades. She said that until incel ideology emerged as a terroristic threat, most researchers and organizations working in this space did not seriously consider the link between gender-based hatred and public violence.
But this discovery has also presented Miller-Idriss and PERIL with an intriguing approach to preventing multiple forms of violence.
"We have made an argument that you have to address misogyny and anti feminism if you're going to address any other form of hate, because it's a gateway," Miller-Idriss said. "It's like a Trojan horse that carries all these other forms of anti-immigration, anti-Muslim ideas [and] anti-Semitic ideas."
The partnership with the Chicago Sky offers PERIL a unique launching pad to test educational materials and messaging around combatting misogyny. Together, the franchise and PERIL are launching a campaign called "Be the Sixth Player," which guides sports fans to intervene when they see misogynistic rhetoric or social media posts targeting people in the sport.
"It's this idea of, you need somebody to also say, 'That's not OK,' " Miller-Idriss said. "Because all of them kind of support an ecosystem in which these forms of hate and harm can become normalized."
A particular target on Black, women athletes
Over the last 12 months, a Texas man was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for stalking Clark, and an Indiana man was charged with stalking Sophie Cunningham. Both play for the Fever and are white. These high-profile instances of criminal harassment illustrate how threats have touched WNBA players across racial identities.
But statistically, online abuse has disproportionately taken aim at Black women athletes.
"Race compounds here," said Michael Pattullo, head of insights for Moonshot's U.S. office. "So what we see is abuse aimed at Black women athletes is frequently both racialized and sexualized at higher rates than what we see for their white teammates facing similar visibility."
De la Cretaz said that the very characteristics that made the WNBA inclusive and diverse are now the reasons that the league and its players are under attack.
"Almost all of [the players] are multiply marginalized, which means that they have more than one identity that they can face oppression and marginalization over," de la Cretaz said. "They are majority Black women. Many of them are openly queer and/or masculine-presenting. And so the combination of identities means it's not just that they're going to experience sexist abuse or threats. They're also experiencing racism. They're also experiencing homophobia."
Rawlinson said that adding protective layers around her players, through the work with PERIL and Moonshot, is a logical business decision.
"I just want my players to think about their one mission, which is to be the most competitive, best player that they can when they come out to the court every night for a game," she said.
A rising trend across sports
Data that Moonshot has gathered suggests that the WNBA is not unique in experiencing an explosion of online abuse against its athletes. Moonshot also conducted online threat monitoring for Team USA in both the Paris 2024 Olympics, and the Milano-Cortina 2026 games.
"Per athlete, we had seven times more threats of violence, five times more non-consensual, intimate imagery and two times as many credible threats escalated to law enforcement," Neumann said. "And that's just in a two year period."
Within that data set, Neumann said the racial and gender component of the abuse was clear. Ninety percent of the threats targeted women athletes; eighty percent targeted people of color.
Pattullo said that the abuse directed toward women athletes also differed qualitatively from what male athletes received.
"When threats are directed at men, they skew more toward performance-based hostility, whereas for women, the abuse is disproportionately about their identity, their gender, their appearance, their sexuality," Pattullo said. "Performance has very little to do with the threats that they receive."
Neumann said that some of these trends tie back to changing technology and social media platforms. AI has made it easier, she said, for bad actors to generate fake nude images of players and to find and post addresses associated with players and their loved ones. Additionally, she said that across social media platforms, it has become harder to get companies to remove that content when it's flagged.
But Neumann said the deteriorating environment is also coming from a shift in social discussions around what women are and what they should be.
"There's a bit of a cultural moment that we're finding ourselves in where misogyny is on the rise," she said.
De la Cretaz said everything about WNBA players has put them in the crosshairs of that discussion.
"They reject the idea that women shouldn't play sports. They reject the idea that you have to be a 'tradwife.' They reject the idea that you have to be feminine," they said. "And so there's so many different places that they are really opposed to the kind of the more conservative cultural push right now that I think they're just kind of taking the brunt."
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