Wednesday night saw lots of discussion of Susan Slusser’s San Francisco Chronicle report that the Oakland A’s now expect Kyler Murray (this year’s Heisman Trophy winner, who they chose in the first round of the MLB draft last year) to declare for the NFL draft, with plenty of A’s fans expressing some disappointment. However, Jen Rainwater took it to a whole different level.
Rainwater was one of 13 front page writers on SB Nation’s Athletics Nation masthead until she was removed Thursday morning. She was featured in an October interview on SBNation.com, and still has a user profile at Athletics Nation. Her last post for the site seems to have been a December 11 piece on Blake Treinen. On Wednesday, she decided to specifically go at Murray with several incendiary tweets tagging him. She’s since deleted the tweets and her whole Twitter account, but the internet doesn’t forget. Here are the key tweets in question, via AA’s Ben Koo:
Meanwhile, others posted that Rainwater had previously harassed them. One notable story there came from Jessica Kleinschmidt of NBC Sports Bay Area, who tweeted about past direct message exchanges with Rainwater. Those included Rainwater calling Kleinschmidt “a big haired fat bimbo,” a “dumb girl” and more and going after her about her pets:
I’ve blocked her since but: pic.twitter.com/LoZ67dl3rk
— Jessica Kleinschmidt (@KleinschmidtJD) January 10, 2019
Kleinschmidt told AA she received further harassing DMs from Rainwater Thursday morning, with additional insults about her appearance and her work. And she wasn’t the only one sharing stories about Rainwater:
https://twitter.com/sjl8n97/status/1083406194264264705
Meanwhile, SB Nation has cut ties with Rainwater. On Thursday morning, over 12 hours after Rainwater’s tweets, Athletics Nation posted this:
The comments made by @Baseball_Jen about @TheKylerMurray obviously do not reflect the views or opinions of Athletics Nation. They are unacceptable and we do not condone them. We and Vox Media have ended our relationship with this writer.
— Athletics Nation (@athleticsnation) January 10, 2019
And while Rainwater deleted her Twitter account, she took to Facebook…to claim people have been trolling her for years and fabricating her tweets? (Update: she’s since deleted that post too, but we screenshotted it.)
“All I have to say is good luck you pathetic lying losers.” Well, then.