Dianna Russini Reveals New NFL Projects 7 Months After Mike Vrabel Photo Scandal: ‘Not Scared to Get Back in’ (Exclusive)

Janelle GriffithMon, November 9, 2026 at 4:16 PM UTC

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Dianna Russini is returning to sports journalism with her new weekly show, “The Russini Report.”Credit: Elias Neijens -

Dianna Russini is returning to sports journalism, sharing exclusively with PEOPLE that she’s starting a new project about the NFL

Russini will host her own show, The Russini Report, and write an accompanying column, and will also be a regular contributor on a podcast with Jon Weiner

“I’m not scared to get back in because I know the people that I cover are welcoming me back with open arms,” Russini says

Dianna Russini made a name for herself as one of the NFL’s premier insiders across her runs at ESPN and The Athletic.

But in April, Russini found herself at the center of headlines when Page Six published photos of her and New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel embracing and holding hands at an Arizona hotel. The images drew widespread scrutiny and speculation — both Russini and Vrabel, who are married to other people, denied allegations of impropriety — and Russini, 43, resigned from her position at The Athletic.

“The best way to describe what the last six months were like for me is heartbreaking,” Russini tells PEOPLE exclusively. “At the beginning of this, it was a nightmare.”

With the support of her husband, Kevin Goldschmidt, and loved ones, Russini navigated a turbulent stretch of her career and is now preparing to return to sports media. Enter The Russini Report, a one-hour show that will stream on BetUS TV’s website and X account beginning Wednesday, Nov. 11. Russini will also write an accompanying column to the series, which will air Wednesdays at 12 p.m. EST.

“It’s really going to be a show about everything I know that’s going on in the NFL,” Russini says, “along with a lot of my opinions,” describing the latter as “something I wasn’t really allowed to do before.”

Pro Football Hall of Famer and two-time Super Bowl champion Bill Parcells and sports radio personality Damon Amendolara will be Russini’s first guests.

Dianna Russini.Credit: Elias Neijens

Russini will also be a featured contributor on the Nobody’s Safe podcast with popular sports radio host Jon Weiner, better known as Stugotz. Russini says Weiner was the first person to express support publicly amid the photo scandal.

“In a time when it was easy to pile on, and I think people were enjoying watching my career fall apart, Jon was really bold and loyal, and he was a friend to me,” she says.

In recent months, as Russini weighed her next professional move, Weiner said something that stuck with her: “‘I need my friend to laugh again. And I want to help her laugh again,’ ” she recalls. “I think this show is going to give me that opportunity.”

Russini says she also found support from dozens of people in the NFL — team owners, agents, general managers, head coaches and players, including “star quarterbacks.”

“The absolute best part of this situation has been the loyalty the NFL has shown me,” Russini says. “They checked in with me almost daily while I wasn’t working to make sure that I was staying connected to football, to check on me as a person and to just see how I was doing.”

It became what Russini describes as “a motivational tour.”

“I felt like players were texting and calling me to say, ‘Get back to work, it’s time,’ ” she says. “I think it’s pretty poetic that here I was all these years telling the story about these players going through adversity, and then they became sort of the people that I was learning from during this.”

Russini says many of them encouraged her to find the strength to pursue her passion once again. “They didn’t just call the week after things came out, they called all the time just to say, ‘Let’s go,’ ” she says.

According to Russini, one player even texts her on his way to work at 5 a.m. to ask what she’s doing to better herself and reminds her “that you have to stay strong through hard times.”

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“I’m using a lot of that as motivation, and it’s why I’m so energized,” she says. “It’s why I’m not scared to get back in because I know the people that I cover are welcoming me back with open arms.”

Goldschmidt has been Russini’s biggest supporter. Married for six years, Russini says she initially followed the news coverage of herself after resigning from The Athletic because she felt she couldn’t escape it. But about a month in, Russini and her family decided they would no longer keep up with the news cycle. The mother of two and Goldschmidt, a Shake Shack executive, also deleted their X accounts.

“The lies became so out of control,” Russini claims. “This was a runaway train, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Once we realized nothing was going to stop this, it became unhealthy for us to read it because it wasn’t helping us heal. It was piling on and adding to what we were already dealing with.”

In the spring, tabloids unearthed multiple photos of Russini and Vrabel, 51, taken over several years. The coverage began with paparazzi shots of them hanging out poolside at a luxury hotel in Arizona this past March. Images of the pair at a New York City bar in 2020 followed, along with footage of a 2021 boat outing in Tennessee, where Vrabel coached the Titans from 2018 to 2023.

Both Russini and Vrabel, who has been married to wife Jen since 1999, denied having anything more than a professional reporter-source relationship.

Dianna Russini.Credit: Elias Neijens

“One of the hard parts about this was that a lot of the work I was doing and the things that I’ve accomplished got lost,” Russini says. “It quickly went from just one moment that people felt was true, and erased years of work.”

Then, in September, The Athletic released a report from its internal investigation that found Russini’s relationship with Vrabel gave the appearance of a conflict of interest and “was in clear violation” of the publication’s standards.

The fallout changed Russini as a woman, a wife and a mother.

“I would not wish that experience on any person ever,” she says. “But through it, I did get an opportunity to not just learn about myself, but my family and our priorities, and maybe some decisions and things I was doing in my career, and putting it before what I really wanted most, which was to be a mom. And while it was so hard at first, feeling their love and support helped me believe that, ‘Wait, I know I can go back to doing this. I know that they’re settled. I know that we’re a unit, and no one is going to come between us. Nothing’s going to break us.’ ”

It also influenced the type of journalist Russini aspires to be moving forward.

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“The way I’m going to approach stories is going to be very different now,” she says. “I have an understanding and an empathy that I didn’t have before. I would do stories in the past at the best of my ability, and sometimes now I reflect on those, and I don’t know if I always thought about how much this would affect not just the player, but a team, an organization, the players’ families.”

“Now that I’ve been in the center of this attention and understanding that this wasn’t just something that shook me, it affected my 94-year-old grandmother, my cousins, family members I haven’t even spoken to in years,” she adds. “It just had a really lasting effect, and I don’t necessarily know if I ever really thought about that as much as I should.”

Being out of the spotlight has also helped Russini “discover the best version” of herself.

“I really hope that I can be someone other women see: you can pick yourself up, get back in there and not be afraid,” she says. “Because if you just do the work — and I hope to continue working at a high level — that’s all that’s going to matter. And I hope that quiets the noise.”

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