During Traffic Stop, N.F.L. Reporter Appeared to Show Off Her Access

Video footage of a traffic stop shows Dianna Russini, a former star N.F.L. reporter for The Athletic, trying to impress a New Jersey police officer by flaunting her proximity to prominent figures in the league.

“What is your team?” Ms. Russini asks the officer, who pulled her over after he observed her using her phone while driving.

“I’m a Vikings fan, unfortunately,” the officer, from the Ridgewood, N.J., force, replies.

Ms. Russini then reaches for her phone and raises an index finger while giving the officer a look. She appears to be searching for something on her phone.

“Let’s see it,” the officer says.

She turns her phone in his direction to show him what appears to be an exchange of text messages. “Can you see the name?” she asks.

“Oh, my God, K.O.C.?” the officer says, repeating a nickname for Kevin O’Connell, the head coach of the Minnesota Vikings. Ms. Russini then tells him that, in her opinion, the team’s quarterback “sucks.”

She didn’t get a ticket that day.

The officer’s body-worn camera footage — first reported on Monday by Adam Herbets, an investigative reporter for The Center Square, and later obtained by The New York Times — captured an interaction on Jan. 19 that bears similarities to a story Ms. Russini told when she was a guest on a radio show and podcast in February. However, on that show, Ms. Russini described placing a call to an N.F.L. coach who then vouched for her to the police officer.

“I FaceTime the head coach,” Ms. Russini said on the show, “Stugotz and Company,” without naming which coach. “Head coach is in his office. He said, ‘What’s up?’ I go, ‘I just got pulled over, and I just wanted you to meet my friend, Officer Joe.’” Ms. Russini said that the coach helped her get out of the ticket by telling the officer, “You should let her go, she’s a good citizen.”

That anecdote was featured prominently in a Times article last week that examined Ms. Russini’s career and her breakup with The Athletic, a sports publication owned by The New York Times Company, after photographs published in The New York Post seemed to suggest that she had a close personal relationship with the New England Patriots head coach, Mike Vrabel.

It was not certain whether the January traffic stop was the same incident that Ms. Russini described in detail on the podcast. Ms. Russini did not respond to a request for comment or respond to a text message from a reporter asking specifically if the traffic stop seen on the police video was the same as the traffic stop she discussed in detail on the podcast. (Jon Weiner, the radio and podcast host known as Stugotz, also did not respond to a message seeking comment.)

In both the video footage and the story she told on the podcast, she described being on her phone because she was reporting on the firing of Buffalo Bills head coach Sean McDermott, which was first reported the morning of the stop. And in both cases, Ms. Russini shows off her access to the coach of the officer’s favorite team, and then avoids a citation.

“Listen, I’m going to cut you a break on the cellphone,” the officer says near the end of the video. “I understand your job requires you to be on the phone a lot. Just try to wait until you get home, OK?”

He added: “Keep me up-to-date on the Vikings, OK? Let me know if K.O.C. is going to get a new quarterback.”

In a statement posted online on Monday, Chief Forest Lyons of the Ridgewood Police Department said that the officer who pulled over Ms. Russini used his discretion in deciding to give her a warning instead of a ticket, in line with the village’s “community-oriented policing” guidelines.

No footage of another traffic stop involving Ms. Russini has yet surfaced. Mr. Herbets, the journalist, said he sent records requests last week to 20 police departments near Wyckoff, N.J., where Ms. Russini lives.

On “Stugotz,” Ms. Russini said she had been pulled over twice in a month with her children in the car. The first time, she said, one of her sons was “screaming in the back,” and the officer felt badly for her, letting her go without a ticket. The second time, she told the host, was the day that Mr. McDermott was fired and that she FaceTimed a head coach. (The whole interior of Ms. Russini’s car is not visible in the footage of this stop on Jan. 19, but neither she nor the officer are seen interacting with or referencing children.)

“I was desperate,” she said to the radio host, explaining why she had tried to impress the officer with her connection. “I was. I don’t want to get a ticket.”

Kelly McBride, the chair of the Newmark Center for Ethics at the Poynter Institute and a former ombudswoman at ESPN, told The Times last week that calling a head coach to help get out of a ticket would have been abuse of Ms. Russini’s access. On Tuesday, Ms. McBride noted the difference between the story Ms. Russini told on the podcast — in which she describes calling a coach — and the story told by the footage, in which she seems to show off her messages to a coach on her phone screen.

“Not only did Russini brag about abusing her insider access for personal gain; if these incidents are one and the same, she apparently embellished the story to the point of fabrication, which is alarming behavior for a journalist,” Ms. McBride said in an email.

The police body-camera footage also raises questions about Ms. Russini’s handling of her communications with sources. After explaining to the officer that Mr. McDermott had been fired from the Bills, Ms. Russini pointed to her phone and said that she had been talking with Brian Daboll, the former head coach of the New York Giants.

“Do you know who I was on the phone with?” she said. “Brian Daboll. He wants the job,” she said, referring to Mr. McDermott’s former position.

A spokeswoman for the Tennessee Titans, who hired Mr. Daboll as offensive coordinator, did not return a request for comment.

A spokesman for the Minnesota Vikings did not respond to a request for comment about Ms. Russini showing off texts with the person the officer described as “K.O.C.”

Asked about the new footage, Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for the Times Company, referred reporters to an earlier statement in which she characterized the story that Ms. Russini told on “Stugotz” as “unacceptable conduct.”

In April, after photos of Ms. Russini with Mr. Vrabel were published by The New York Post, The Athletic began an investigation of her work. Ms. Ha said Tuesday that the publication’s investigation “is still ongoing.”

The Times’s article last week about Ms. Russini noted her former stature at The Athletic. She served as “senior N.F.L. insider,” effectively making her the Times Company’s top reporter on the country’s most popular sports league. She was also highly paid relative to other journalists at the company, with a salary of close to $800,000, according to a former manager who had knowledge of her salary negotiation.

In the traffic stop footage, captured less than three months before the photos of Ms. Russini with Mr. Vrabel made headlines, the officer asks whom she reports for.

“I work for The Athletic,” she tells him, “which is like The New York Times.”