Dijonai Carrington, the Connecticut Sun player who now-infamously poked Caitlin Clark in eye during the WNBA playoffs, mocked the incident during an Instagram live stream on Wednesday.
Filming with her girlfriend and fellow WNBA player NaLyssa Smith – who is a teammate of Clark’s on the Indiana Fever – Carrington appeared to stage a dramatic recreation of the moment she poked Clark.
Smith looked to deliberately catch her girlfriend’s eye before Carrington said, ‘You poked me in the eye’ with a smile on her face.
The pair then began laughing and Carrington asked, ‘Did you do it on purpose?,’ appearing to mock USA TODAY columnist Christine Brennan as well.
While Clark was left with a black eye from the real incident in the game, she said the eye poke ‘wasn’t intentional.’
However, the moment continued to swirl in the headlines after Brennan asked Carrington if the eye poke was deliberate.
She also asked if her and a teammate had been laughing about it afterwards.
Carrington denied that she meant to poke Clark, but the WNBA players’ union reacted furiously to Brennan’s line of questioning as they called for her credentials to be revoked.
‘To unprofessional members of the media like Christine Brennan: You are not fooling anyone,’ the statement read.
‘The so-called interview in the name of journalism was a blatant attempt to bait a professional athlete into participating in a narrative that is false and designed to fuel racist, homophobic, and misogynistic vitriol on social media. You cannot hide behind your tenure.’
‘Instead of of demonstrating the cornerstones of journalism ethics like integrity, objectivity and fundamental commitment to truth, you have chosen to be indecent and downright insincere,’ they added.
Clark was sporting a clear shiner on her right eye in her postgame press conference
lark was sporting a clear shiner on her right eye in her postgame press conference
‘You have abused your privileges and do not deserve the credentials issued to you. And you certainly are not entitled to any interviews with the members of this union or any other athlete in the sport.’
Brennan later revealed on iHeart’s ‘Good Game with Sarah Spain’ that Carrington’s teammate DeWanna Bonner approached her afterwards about her line of questioning.
Spain later reported that Brennan actually filed a complaint against Bonner too, but Brennan has denied that.
Though Clark’s Fever and Carrington’s Sun have been eliminated from the postseason, the WNBA playoffs are still going on with the Liberty down 1-0 to the Lynx.
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