THE SIDELINES : Post Sportswriter Defends Her Peer in Harassment Incident

Washington Post sportswriter Christine Brennan defended Boston Herald colleague Lisa Olson today, saying Olson’s sexual harassment by several New England Patriots football players is “the worst I’ve ever heard in my 10 years of sports writing.”

“I’ve been in 500 locker rooms. I have rolled my eyes. I have laughed. I’ve had towels thrown at me. I’ve had whoops and hollers,” said Brennan, who was the Post’s beat reporter covering the Washington Redskins in the mid-1980s.

“I’ve been taking it for 10 years, Lisa’s been taking it for that long,” Brennan said during an interview on Cable News Network. “We’ve had hundreds of women taking it, taking and taking it and we continue to do so because we love these jobs.”

Olson said Thursday that during the Sept. 17 incident in the Patriots’ locker room, she was sitting down when Zeke Mowatt came up, exposed himself and made lewd remarks.

NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue had summoned Mowatt to a meeting today in New York, but the meeting was postponed Thursday when Tagliabue said he would appoint a special counsel to investigate the incident.