KAROL MARKOWICZ: There is no case against Dave Portnoy.

#MeToo started with Harvey Weinstein, ‎Matt Lauer, R. Kelly. Big names who did very bad things. Masturbating in plants, desk buttons that locked doors, women being held against their will, rape.

But now we’re on to chasing down every woman a famous man has slept with to get a couple of them to say they had a bad time.

A piece in Business Insider last week accused Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy of just that. Two women accuse Portnoy of sex they didn’t enjoy. If the era of #MeToo was kicked off with Portnoy instead of Weinstein, it would have been a complete bust. #MeToo caught fire because the accusations against these famous men were so major. The accusations against Portnoy are not.

Portnoy has taken the accusations very seriously and has aggressively responded. We haven’t seen any of the previously accused men put up a fight like this.

In a freewheeling hour-long press conference, Portnoy spent an hour breaking down the details of the case against him. He vehemently denies the accusations and has produced text messages from the girls following the encounters as well as showing an absurd police report where a mom of one of the girls vaguely accuses Portnoy of inviting 18-year-old girls to his house.

And note this: Dave Portnoy calls out the Washington Post for not allowing him to record his interview with the paper.

Washpo — “Portnoy declined to comment for this story after The Post declined his terms for conducting an interview.”

My terms were let me record interview so you can’t cut and edit. Same thing I offered to let Business Insider do. Weird how nobody but me will accept these terms.

Not so weird when you flashback to something Jill Abramson, former editor of the New York Times, admitted in 2019. “I do not record. I’ve never recorded. I’m a very fast note-taker. When someone kind of says the ‘it’ thing that I have really wanted, I don’t start scribbling right away. I have an almost photographic memory and so I wait a beat or two while they’re onto something else, and then I write down the previous thing they said. Because you don’t want your subject to get nervous about what they just said.”

In September of 2008, after Charlie Gibson of ABC’s deceptively edited his interview with Sarah Palin, Glenn warned “Bring Your Own Camera.” Similarly, when sitting down with a print journalist, make sure the Voice Memo app has been activated on your iPhone.