Nearly a year after ESPN removed Rachel Nichols from its airwaves, the longtime NBA reporter has a new job at Showtime, where she will work as a host and reporter on everything from podcasts to documentaries to potentially a new monthly show.
, who is White, complaining about a job she had been asked to give up to fellow NBA host Maria Taylor, who is Black.
Nichols, on a phone call she didn’t know was being recorded, suggested that if ESPN wanted to improve its record on diversity, the network shouldn’t do it by giving Taylor Nichols’s contractually guaranteed job as host of the NBA Finals.In her first appearance on Showtime on Friday, Nichols joined the video podcast, “All the Smoke," with former NBA players Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes, and publicly offered for the first time her version of the events that led to her ESPN departure.
She added that human resources investigated the tape and found she didn’t need to be disciplined. “I thought we had put things behind us, and unfortunately there were still some people who had bad feelings and held on to this tape for a year,” she said. “Just kept it in their pocket. And when there was a point they wanted some leverage with their own situations they fed it to the press.
The recording was made from Nichols’s hotel room in Orlando during the NBA bubble in 2020. She said the camera was inadvertently running in her hotel room for hours and that someone at ESPN had used a cellphone to record the video of her and then circulate it around ESPN. Nichols said she attempted to call, text and set up a meeting with Taylor to apologize but that Taylor was not interested. After the tape was published last year, Nichols was removed from NBA Finals coverage, and later in the summer she was removed from the network’s airwaves.
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