Jemele Hill is bringing Caitlin Clark’s Morgan Wallen moment back into the spotlight, and she’s making the same point she made when the controversy first blew up: Clark never should have been dragged for it.
The conversation picked up again after a viral video showed Wallen walking out with Ray Lewis during a concert stop in Baltimore. Hill jumped in with a quote-tweet and wrote, “This is why Caitlin Clark should have never gotten s-t for doing the same thing.”
That was a direct callback to the backlash Clark faced in May, when she walked out onstage with Wallen during one of his Indianapolis concerts just hours after a season-opening loss to the Dallas Wings. Critics seized on Wallen’s 2021 use of a racial slur and argued Clark should have avoided him, especially given the WNBA’s largely Black player base. Around the same time, some fans also used the moment to pile on Clark with unrelated criticism of her play.
Hill was pushing back on that line of attack then, too. On her podcast at the time, she said Clark was being held to a different standard and pointed to male athletes who had walked out with Wallen without drawing nearly the same heat, including Peyton Manning, Travis Kelce, Myles Garrett and Marshawn Lynch.
The Baltimore clip gave Hill another example to work with. Lewis, a Black Hall of Fame linebacker, appeared with Wallen and did not face the kind of backlash Clark did months earlier. For Hill, that only sharpened the argument that Clark had been singled out unfairly.
Hill has taken criticism for this topic before. She previously drew heat for a now-deleted post saying Clark didn’t face the same online abuse as Black WNBA players, a claim that aged poorly after a man was arrested for allegedly stalking Clark.
Clark, for her part, never publicly addressed the May backlash. She kept moving and let her game do the talking, a pattern she’s maintained all season. Earlier this week, she turned in a historic 45-point performance against the Seattle Storm, another reminder of why she remains the WNBA’s biggest draw.
Hill’s latest post has already pulled in hundreds of thousands of views, a sign that the Clark-Wallen debate still has plenty of life left in it.