Ex-ESPN Producer Nicole Noren Says She Quit Over Gambling Ties; ESPN Says It Remains Committed to Journalism

Nicole Noren spent 24 years at ESPN, produced more than 50 investigative pieces and short documentaries, and left the network over gambling. She laid out her reasons in an interview with Danny Funt of the Columbia Journalism Review, published Wednesday, Oct. 14.

"I was out," Noren said of ESPN's move into betting. "I'm not going to work for a gambling company and have blood on my hands."

A family history with the sportsbook

Noren said her objection is personal. "My grandfather, my father, and one of my brothers were pretty much destroyed by sports gambling addiction," she told CJR.

She grew up in Ventura, California, and said the family moved suddenly more than once because of financial swings. "I grew up in a sportsbook," she said, describing childhood trips to the sportsbooks at the Las Vegas Hilton and Caesars, and to horse and dog tracks.

Her brother died 13 years ago on a downtown Las Vegas sidewalk, homeless, at age 36. "Addiction dictated every part of our life," she said. "It's very, very personal to me."

The business timeline

ESPN signed a 10-year licensing deal with Penn Entertainment in August 2023, reportedly worth $1.5 billion. ESPN Bet launched that November.

The product did not take off. Its market share stalled around 5% by early 2025, according to Essentially Sports. ESPN and Penn ended the deal effective Dec. 1, 2025.

ESPN announced a multi-year deal with DraftKings on Nov. 6, 2025, effective the same Dec. 1, according to ESPN's press release at the time. This past March, the two companies let customers link their ESPN and DraftKings accounts. The companies described the arrangement as going beyond a traditional marketing deal.

Noren left ESPN in 2024, according to Yahoo Sports and Essentially Sports. She says the ESPN Bet announcement was her breaking point.

The Iger quote

Noren told CJR she was stunned in part because Disney's Bob Iger had told investors the company would stay out of gambling. "I don't see the Walt Disney Company, certainly in the near term, getting involved in the business of gambling, in effect, by facilitating gambling in any way," Iger said.

ESPN is a Disney property. The company has not been reported to have addressed the gap between that statement and the Penn and DraftKings deals.

Stories that went nowhere

Noren's allegations go beyond advertising. She said that over the past five to seven years, she and her colleagues on the investigative unit noticed "a rocky path to report some stories that involved stakeholders." She said the wall between business and editorial became "a little more penetrable."

She said none of the stories she pitched on gambling companies and addiction were greenlit. When ESPN did cover the topic, she said, the result was "very neutered."

"Some of the people involved intended to make it much more hard-hitting and hold the gambling companies accountable," Noren said. "Let's just say the final product didn't end up doing that."

She also said that when she took her concerns to ESPN leadership, she saw "a seeming disregard for the dangers."

These are one former employee's claims. No other ESPN staffer has corroborated them on the record in the accounts reviewed here.

ESPN's response

ESPN rejects the suggestion. In a statement to Sports Media Watch, the network said it "remains committed to journalism that serves sports fans, holds powerful interests accountable and earns our audience's trust."

"Our editorial decisions are guided by news judgment and journalistic integrity," the statement continued, "and we demonstrate this every day through the award-winning content we produce across our platforms."

The statement did not address the specific stories Noren says were blocked or diluted.

The wider record on ESPN and its partners

Some facts predate Noren's account. ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro took over from John Skipper in 2018. According to Sports Business Journal's John Ourand, the NFL had soured on ESPN's reporting on its controversies by then.

ESPN has since canceled Outside the Lines, where much of Noren's work ran. It struck a new NFL rights deal in 2021. Last year it agreed to acquire NFL Network and other NFL Media assets, with the NFL taking a 10% stake in ESPN.

No source has tied those moves to editorial decisions on specific stories. ESPN reporter Don Van Natta, who co-wrote many of the pieces that irritated the NFL about a decade ago, has publicly defended ESPN's journalism, according to Sports Media Watch.

Who Noren is

Noren holds six Emmy Awards, a Peabody, two Edward R. Murrow Awards and five Gracie Awards. She now runs her own production company. Her short film The Green Truck screened at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in February 2026.

Nobody is arguing that placing a bet is a moral failing. Adults can make their own choices, and sports betting has been legal nationwide since the 2018 Supreme Court ruling. The narrower question Noren raises is what happens when the network that covers the leagues also shares revenue with the sportsbooks, and what that does to its willingness to report on gambling harms.

That question is unanswered. ESPN has not said how many gambling-addiction stories its investigative unit pitched or ran after the Penn and DraftKings deals. The DraftKings arrangement, with its linked accounts, remains in effect.