Two days before the April 19th suicide of Aaron Hernandez, the former star New England Patriots tight end who had been serving a life sentence for the murder of his friend Odin Lloyd, the investigative journalist Michele McPhee appeared on a Boston sports radio show. It was “Marathon Monday” in Boston. McPhee, an ABC News producer, formerly a New York Daily News bureau chief, and an author of true-crime books, had been invited on WEEI’s “The Kirk & Callahan Show” to talk about her new book, “Maximum Harm,” which investigates the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Hernandez had just been acquitted of murder the previous Friday, in a separate case. But McPhee’s friends Kirk Minihane and Gerry Callahan wanted to discuss something else: Hernandez’s sexuality, which McPhee had been investigating as a possible motive in the Lloyd murder. Lloyd was shot to death, on June 17, 2013, in an industrial park about a mile from Hernandez’s North Attleborough, Massachusetts, home after spending the previous evening with him. A specific motive for the killing was never established, beyond a suspected breach of trust.
“This rumor,” Callahan said on air, “this Aaron Hernandez rumor—which is so juicy. . . . It is big.”
“It’s something we can certainly play with as the days go on,” Minihane said. “I’m not sure how comfortable Michele is in talking about it.”
McPhee was, however, open to talking about it. “I mean, hey,” she said to her radio pals. “Let’s tease away.”
The three then jokingly riffed—in a cringe-inducing manner familiar to most listeners of American sports radio—on the suggestion that Hernandez was sexually attracted to men. Using football metaphors to insinuate his preference, the men referred to Hernandez as a “tight end on and off the field,” adding, “then he became a wide receiver.” This went on, with McPhee adding that Hernandez kicked “with both feet.”
Two days later, and just hours before his former team stood with Donald Trump at the White House in honor of its Super Bowl win, Hernandez hanged himself in the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, in Shirley, Massachusetts, after inking a Bible verse on his forehead and placing cardboard under his cell door to make it difficult for guards to intervene, as was detailed in the Boston Globe and in McPhee’s subsequent reporting for Newsweek.
McPhee looks back on the radio appearance with a mix of regret and rationalizing. “I was with people that I trusted and knew,” she said recently. “And they brought it up on the air, his sexuality.” She went on, “What I said was really inelegant of me, and it’s not something I would have done if I wasn’t on a sports-radio show. It’s not a laughing matter, in any way, shape, or form. But I would certainly hope, in 2017, that Aaron Hernandez was more troubled by the fact that he killed his close friend, the boyfriend of his fiancée’s sister, than his sexuality.” She added, “His conscience should have been much more haunted by killing his friend.”
McPhee has no regrets about the Newsweek piece itself, which was published on April 21st, under the headline “Aaron Hernandez’s Sex Life Probed as Murder Motive, Police Source Says.” It was the first major national story to focus on Hernandez’s sexuality, which, McPhee told me, “was one thousand per cent being explored as the motive of the murder, which is the only reason why it’s relevant.” Citing “multiple law enforcement officials,” the piece reports on Hernandez’s longtime marijuana use, an “intimate relationship” he had with a male high-school classmate for whom he allegedly set aside “a large amount of money” prior to his arrest in the Lloyd case, and conversations in which Hernandez associates called him a “smoocher” and “limp wrist.” The piece does not provide comment on these claims from any of Hernandez’s family members or associates. Three letters were found in Hernandez’s cell following his suicide; McPhee reports that one was addressed to his fiancée, another to his daughter, and a third to his “prison boyfriend.” There is now general agreement in the press concerning the first two recipients, but the identity of the third recipient is still in dispute.
McPhee published a follow-up on April 26th, titled “ ‘I Think I’m Going to Hang it Up LOL’: Aaron Hernandez Note to Prison Boyfriend.” In the days since McPhee’s initial story, a man had been identified as the alleged boyfriend, and this man’s lawyer held a press conference earlier that day. The lawyer declined to comment on the nature of his client’s relationship with Hernandez, but McPhee, again citing “multiple law enforcement sources,” insists on the label, writing that the lawyer “did not deny that characterization.”
McPhee has been aware of rumors regarding Hernandez’s sexuality since around 2013, she said, when she was with an ABC News team that was among the first on the scene after cops arrived at Hernandez’s home in Massachusetts to question him about Lloyd’s murder. In the years since, while working on other projects, she followed the Hernandez story and continued to learn more, mainly from longtime police sources, that pointed to an unreported motive for killing his friend: that Lloyd knew about Hernandez’s intimate relationships with men and might reveal this secret to others.
“With sensitive information, you obviously have to be a trusted reporter,” McPhee said. “And I’ve built these relationships over decades of being trusted by police in New York and Boston. I worked directly out of One Police Plaza,” the N.Y.P.D.’s headquarters. “I built relationships there. Then I came home—I’m from Boston—and I really do love the beat. I go to cop events. I cover the funerals. I talk to people. I build sources. So if people want to say, ‘How did you get this story and no one else did?,’ it’s because no one is really working the beat anymore.”
Jennifer Peter, the Globe’s senior deputy managing editor, cites a different reason for the absence of a Globe story on the subject. “We have heard the same rumors as everyone else,” she e-mailed me recently, “and have tried to confirm them to the degree they’re relevant to Hernandez’s death, but have not been able to verify that they are based in fact.” A subsequent Globe story on the reporting of the rumors described the mounting ire of gay-rights advocates who maintain that the salacious details in reports like McPhee’s have no bearing on Hernandez’s crimes and thus no relationship to the public interest.
Kelly McBride, a media-ethics expert at the Poynter Institute, offered a more nuanced take. Outing people in the press should generally be avoided, McBride has written, but there are rare exceptions. “Hernandez was involved in a crime, which was investigated by the state,” she told me. “So the information about that crime, including his motive, are of public interest.” Still, accurately and sensitively reporting on a person’s sexual identity requires care, and McBride believes that the Newsweek story was careless. “The fact that Hernandez’s desire to keep a same-sex relationship a secret may have caused him to kill a man and take his own life is something that bears examination,” she said. “But I need a lot more reporting and context to arrive at any valuable understanding.” McBride also read a partial transcript of the segment on “The Kirk & Callahan Show.” “I don’t believe the purpose of the radio conversation or the Newsweek piece was to shed any more understanding on the factors that influenced Hernandez,” she said. Ethically, in her view, the matter is straightforward: “There was harm and no benefit.”
Jose Baez, an attorney for Hernandez, did not return calls requesting comment. But in a statement given to the Globe, he insisted that McPhee’s reporting was not sound: “Rumors of letters to a gay lover in or out of prison are false,” the statement read. “These are malicious leaks used to tarnish someone who is dead.” Earlier, in court, George Leontire, an attorney for Hernandez’s fiancée, told a Massachusetts judge, “The press is killing us. It’s killing this guy. It’s killing his family.” Leontire did not reply to a request for comment.
Chris Curtis, who produces “The Kirk & Callahan Show,” told me that he was proud that his show was the first to explore “the sexuality angle” of the Hernandez case when McPhee was a guest. He also said that he and others involved in the show were “stunned by the news” of Hernandez’s suicide. “There was no feeling of glee or whatever that he murdered himself, and it may have had something to do with something that was said on our show,” he said. The suicide rate among those who are incarcerated is much higher than it is among the general population, and Massachusetts prisons have the fourth-highest suicide rate in the country. Hernandez’s family has reportedly donated his brain to a research center that studies the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy. In the past several years, multiple former N.F.L. players who committed suicide were posthumously diagnosed with the disease.
McPhee, for her part, said that she did not see her story “as an outing. I think this is just reporting on a murder, and some of the reasons that Aaron Hernandez would blow up his entire career to kill somebody,” she said. “Whether or not he had all these sexual feelings, I can’t say.”