Former ESPN Producer Says She Resigned Over Sports Gambling

A former ESPN producer said Wednesday she quit in protest of the network’s embrace of sports gambling.

Nicole Noren, an award-winning producer, quit ESPN in 2023 after two decades in the job. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) published Wednesday, Noren explained that her resignation was driven by the network’s decision to launch its own branded sports gambling app, ESPN Bet, that same year. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Leaked Audio Reveals How Industry Insiders Keep Gamblers Hooked)

“I was out,” she told CRJ. “I’m not going to work for a gambling company and have blood on my hands.”

Noren accused the network of suppressing stories critical of the gambling industry, believing both rank-and-file employees and top executives were “putting their heads in the sand” and ignoring gambling’s harms.

“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 CRJ. “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.”

Noren pointed to one piece of content in particular: an interactive primer on point spreads, totals, and parlays for new bettors. She said the animations 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.” (RELATED: Young Gambling Addict Blew Through $100k On Sports Gambling — But It Didn’t End There)

She also explained how gambling addiction affected her own family.

“My grandfather, my father, and one of my brothers were pretty much destroyed by sports gambling addiction,” Noren told CJR. “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.

“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.”