Dave Portnoy, the founder of media company Barstool Sports, has been suspended from Twitter for 12 hours after he posted a screengrab of an email exchange he had with the editor of Business Insider.
Over the past eight months, the business magazine has published a lengthy expose accusing the Barstool Sports president of having rough sex with women as young as 19 filming them without consent, choking them and spitting on them.
Portnoy, 45, has vehemently denied these claims.
The three women said the sexual encounters were consensual, but soon turned violent, and one woman claimed she was suicidal after having sex with him.
One of the woman identified under the pseudonym Madison, who was 20 at the time of the alleged encounter, told Business Insider she connected with Portnoy after messaging him on Instagram and later told him she fantasized about being raped.
‘You and I are going to get along so well,’ he reportedly responded.
He allegedly bought her a first-class plane ticket to visit him in Nantucket, where she said they shared pizza and she performed oral sex on him.
She told the outlet that he began videotaping the intimate moment without permission.
‘I never said anything,’ she said. ‘I was scared.
‘He was just so mean.’
The pair also had sex, and Business Insider shared an alleged text exchange between Madison and a friend after the hook up.
It said: ‘It was so rough I felt like I was being raped he video taped me and spit in my mouth and choked me so hard I couldn’t breathe.
‘And it hurt and I was literally screaming in pain.’
Madison added: ‘It was so painful. I kept trying to get away and he was like, ‘Stop running away from me. Stop running away from me.’
She said he ‘went harder’ after she protested.
Another woman told Business insider that she too was choked and videotaped during sex without consent.
She said she didn’t want to elaborate for fear of retaliation.
‘I know how he is when someone goes after him,’ she told the outlet.
And a third woman identified under the moniker Allison told Business Insider she was hospitalized with suicidal thoughts after having a fling with Portnoy inside his Nantucket house when she was 19.
‘He leaned in and started kissing me and I didn’t know what to do at that point,’ she told the publication. ‘And we went upstairs and he was really aggressive and I didn’t know what to do and we had sex and that was it and he kicked me out.’
The woman claimed Portnoy chocked her during sex and repeatedly spat in her mouth.
‘I was kind of scared,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to disappoint him.’
She said two photos – a selfie of her and Portnoy and a snap of her leaving the house – soon circulated around the island community, exposing their fling.
‘I guess it was kind of my breaking point,’ Allison told a reporter.
She was hospitalized three nights later suffering from mental health issues, but says she does not consider her encounter with Portnoy a sexual assault.
Instagram influencer Ava Louiise also discussed her interactions with Portnoy during a Business Insider interview, saying she began chatting with him when she was 19 and he was 40.
‘I never reach out. I noticed you 2 weeks ago and was interested,’ Portnoy said in a text to the teen, according to Insider.
He later added: ‘I thought about you a bunch last night. Not all wholesome all the time.’
She replied: ‘I wanna be famous so bad I’d be so good at it.’
‘I’m a good start then,’ Portnoy said.
Ava Louise said she ultimately decided not to hook up with Portnoy, and in hindsight found his behavior ‘predatory.’
‘It’s every man that has followers or status of any sort, and it’s kind of, like, terrifying in a way,’ she said.
This isn’t the first time the Barstool Sports founder has been suspended from the social media network.
In June, some of his 2.5 million followers on the platform noticed his account had been suspended, with a message saying: ‘Twitter suspends accounts which violate the Twitter rules.’
Portnoy had tweeted 11 times that day, serving up the usual mix of ‘bro’ jokes, sports references and pizza reviews.
In one he appeared to have an argument with a critic of shares in Penn National Gaming, which he holds: ‘So sell it. Mark your calendar. Dm me 1 year from today. Let me drop my nuts on your head.’
He then tweeted a review of a pizza restaurant in Nashville, and joked about horse racing at Royal Ascot.
But the account was then suspended, and the official account for Barstool Sports, a digital media company founded in 2003, tweeted directly to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, attaching a photo of Dorsey and Portnoy.
‘Only one man can save us now @jack #FREEPORTNOY,’ they wrote.
Around 9:10 p.m., the account was restored.
Portnoy has also faced charges of racism during the Black Lives Matter protests last summer.