Noren, an ESPN employee for two decades, revealed in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review that her resignation in 2023 was provoked by the network’s decision to launch its own branded sports gambling app, ESPN Bet. Noren said that she knew first hand the dangers of gambling, and had good reason to believe encouraging or enabling it, and certainly profiting by it, was unconscionable.
“My brother died thirteen years ago on the sidewalk in downtown Las Vegas,” she said. “It’s a stark reality, but it illustrates the tragic arc of being brought there as kids so our dad could gamble at sportsbooks, to then surviving on the streets there as a homeless person and dying at thirty-six.”
Her grandfather and father, as well as her brother “were pretty much destroyed by sports gambling addiction,” Noren told the publication. “I grew up in Ventura, California, and multiple times, we suddenly had to move because of extreme financial ups and downs. I mean, I grew up in a sportsbook. We didn’t go to museums and typical places kids go to. We were dragged to Las Vegas in the eighties and hanging out in the Hilton and Caesars sportsbooks, when kids weren’t supposed to be around there. I remember going to the horse track, going to the dog track.”
So when ESPN decided to embrace legalized sports gambling in’23, “I was out,” she says. “I’m not going to work for a gambling company and have blood on my hands.”
Noren also accused the network of suppressing stories critical of the gambling industry.“What was telling to me was that I had pitched numerous stories that would take a harder look at some of the gambling companies and addiction, and none of those stories were greenlit,” she told the Review. “They ended up doing a show on it around that time, but it became very neutered. Some of the people involved intended to make it much more hard-hitting and hold the gambling companies accountable. Let’s just say the final product didn’t end up doing that.”
There was even an interactive primer on point spreads, totals, and parlays for new bettors with animations that were “pretty much made for kids.” “What bothered me most was a seeming disregard for the dangers and not thinking about the ramifications of ESPN normalizing gambling for an audience that looks to ESPN as sort of their sports guide, essentially—not looking down the road at the parallels between gambling and other addictive things in our country that have been normalized, such as opioids and cigarettes, that ended up becoming major public health crises.”
Brava, though Noren’s resignation was until now only a personal statement with no broader impact on society or this expanding ethics problem, which EA has been discussing for many years. ESPN Bet is dead, lasting only through last year, but that’s just moral luck. Noren was right: her employer willing to get “blood on its hands” in exchange for money in its metaphorical pockets, so the ethical course was to refuse to be a part of a corrupt organization and its culture.
What are desperately needed now are executives, broadcasters, celebrities and athletes who are willing to take similar stands against teams and sponsors. A politician or two would be nice too.
