Megan Rapinoe revealed in an interview with NPR this week that former OL Reign coach Farid Benstiti made “fat-shaming” comments to players.
The coach was forced to resign in July, and at the time, there wasn’t much revealed as to why the move was made. But the Washington Post reported in October that a complaint was filed against Benstiti for verbal abuse, specifically that he “allegedly made inappropriate comments to players regarding their fitness and nutrition.” The team’s CEO Bill Predmore said in a statement to the Post at the time that he requested the coach’s resignation after being notified of “the inappropriate comments by a player.”
Rapinoe said to NPR, “He made some—it was basically like a fat-shaming comment. He was talking about—he’s going to, like, take people’s food away. And I’m like, oh, my God, grow up. You just got yourself fired; you’re so stupid.
“But, like, just little stuff like that where if you’re making $25,000 and you have no autonomy over your rights, you have—you’re not a free agent. You’re barely scraping by. You just came out of college. Like, you’re not going to say anything. You’re just not. Like, it’s too difficult to put someone in that position.”
Benstiti’s behavior was known publicly prior to his resignation and even before he was hired by OL Reign in 2020. U.S. national team’s Lindsey Horan spoke about how the coach shamed her for her weight when she played for Benstiti at French club Paris Saint-Germain. She detailed her experiences on a podcast in 2021.
“In France, that was the number one time that I felt like I wanted to quit soccer. I was not enjoying myself and there was just so much wrong being done, that I lost the love for the game,” Horan said on the Butterfly Road podcast. She later added, “One of my teammates, after an away game, she had chocolate and the coach heard it in the front [of the team bus] and came back and basically took the chocolate from her, and said, ‘You can’t have this around Lindsey,’ because I was sitting a seat ahead of her.”
Horan explained on the podcast how she drastically dropped her weight, but Benstiti “announced to the team, ‘Lindsey, your weight is not good enough, your body fat is still too high, You’re not going to play in a game until that’s done.’”
