reached the mountaintop this weekend, and it was good.
Literally, though! The veteran sportscaster and Dancing With the Stars co-host married longtime boyfriend Jarret Stoll in a sunset ceremony atop a Rocky Mountain peak at the Yellowstone Club in Montana.
But while the culmination of her journey with Stoll seemingly went off without a hitch amid nature's grandeur, her trip to the altar—or to any of the highest points in her life—didn't come without its treacherous obstacles.
Andrew, though, has proved that she's nothing if not a fighter—and so far, she stands undefeated.
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First of all, aside from the former athletes who've transitioned into the job after their playing days were over, she's perhaps the most famous of the still very few female faces of sports broadcasting, one of the most insular remaining boys' clubs in the TV business. And, like many broadcasting jobs, breaking into the sports world usually requires that one doesn't get too used to any one location, any one job or any one sport.
After graduating from the University of Florida in 2000 with a degree in telecommunications, the daughter of an award-winning investigative TV journalist and a teacher didn't have a job lined up immediately (she admitted that as a member of the playoff-bound Gators' Dazzlers dance team she was too busy thinking about March Madness to send out many tapes), so she volunteered in the sports department at the local NBC affiliate for about six months.
She scored work for Fox Sports Florida as a freelance reporter, then moved on to cover the Tampa Bay Lightning for the Sunshine Network. After a year of that, then it was onto Georgia to cover the Atlanta Braves as a reporter and on-air host for TBS.
"I was horrible, I sucked," Andrews admitted in 2008 in a chat at her alma mater. "I was a deer in headlights, I was mispronouncing baseball players' names... I spent a whole year concentrating on hockey. I had no idea what was going on in baseball...I learned I wasn't ready for national television but I'm so glad I made the move."
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Two years later, TBS didn't renew her contract. "For seven days I thought I was going to kill myself," she recalled hyperbolically to the students. "I was crying, 'What am I gonna do?!' I was so ridiculous, I didn't turn on lights in my house 'cause I didn't know if I'd be able to pay bills."
When ESPN, still covering hockey at the time, came to Atlanta to cover a Thrashers game, she literally knocked on the door of the production truck to ask if they needed a sideline reporter.
Andrews signed a three-month deal with ESPN in 2004, a most desirable opportunity for anyone seeking the sports-coverage big time, and started sideline-reporting for ESPN National Hockey Night. Acing what she later realized was ESPN's test to see what she could do, by the following year, her reporting role expanded to include college football and basketball, as well as Major League Baseball.
Exactly. All that travel and staying up to date on stats, players and behind-the-scenes twists and turns of NCAA and pro sports is way more than a full-time job. It's a lifestyle.
It was while Andrews was staying in two of the hundreds of hotel rooms she's resided in, during two of her countless trips to cover games while working for ESPN, that she was spied on and recorded. Thinking she was safe and had a certain right to privacy behind a locked door, Andrews was videotaped when she wasn't wearing any clothes—and it wasn't until a blurry video of her walking around naked ended up online in July 2009 that she even knew what had happened.
This scandal, which took years to resolve (if such a thing is every truly resolved in a victim's mind), blew the lid off of what sort of odds she was facing throughout her career as a woman who more than anything was driven to be taken seriously and respected in a male-dominated profession. In Andrews' case, her beauty had of course been an asset to her in her ambitions as an on-camera talent, but it made the ladder doubly steep as far as proving to a tirelessly skeptical and distractable sports audience (and some colleagues) that she had the talent to match the pretty face. Then, ironically, there was also the inevitable criticism about her looks.
In March 2008 during a talk at the College of Journalism and Communications at Florida, Andrews—already named "Sexiest Sportscaster" by Playboy—told the students they were free to ask her anything, because she'd been asked it all, including where to get her outfits and questions about her dating life. Not the questions Bob Costas or Joe Buck are usually asked.
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A little more than a year later, her world turned upside down.
"I kept screaming: 'I'm done. My career is over. I'm done. Get it off. Get it off the Internet,'" Andrews emotionally recalled (to Oprah Winfrey in August 2009, her first interview about what happened) hysterically calling her parents immediately after watching the video online. "They thought I was physically injured, [that's] how bad I was screaming."
She said, "I do know that I am a victim of a stalker, because we know that this happened in at least two rooms. I was getting ready to go work a college football game in at least one of the videos I was able to identify."
Prosecutors would later determine this actually happened to her in at least three cities. Mark David Barrett, an insurance exec from Illinois, pleaded guilty in October 2009 to interstate stalking for following Andrews to at least three locations and shooting video of her through hotel peepholes he manipulated to get a better view. He was sentenced in March 2010 to 2 1/2 years in prison, which Andrews decried as not being nearly enough for being "a sexual deviant."
"It's my body on the Internet," she said at the sentencing. "I'm being traumatized every single day for what he did...This will never be over for me."
The Internet chatter had ranged from the supportive to the truly vile, with some saying that Andrews was asking for that kind of attention. "I did nothing wrong. Just trying to live my life," she said. "I had to deal with a lot of people who said I deserved it, that I had played to a certain audience."
Andrews also lawsuit against Barrett for intentional infliction of emotional distress and against Marriott operators West End Hotel Partners and Windsor Capital Group for negligence, alleging that lax security policies allowed a stalker to check into a room next to her and set up his unauthorized peep show.
Andrews' Oprah interview aired in September 2009, about a week after she returned to work (South Carolina vs. North Carolina St.) following her nightmarish summer. She also opted to accept an offer, made pre-video leak, to compete on Dancing With the Stars the following spring, a fateful choice that won her a host of new fans. She finished in third place dancing with Maksim Chmerkovskiy, who crafted the show's first-ever contemporary routine for the two of them.
Andrews also started lobbying for stricter laws on stalking and became a vocal advocate for victims' rights.
"When someone embarrasses me publicly the way this guy did, I feel I have no choice but to fight back," she told Marie Claire in 2011. "And at the time everything happened, I got a ton of letters from women who were stalking victims. People had set up video cameras in their homes, whether it was a neighbor or a handyman. The videos were on the Internet, and the women couldn't get them down or get these guys arrested. They said, 'First, we want to welcome you to the sorority. But we also want to tell you to please fight this—you're our voice.' I had to."
But while she was able to assert herself in that arena, Andrews was headed for a career crossroads.
Andrews courted controversy when she mentioned during the 2011 Rose Bowl that TCU players were slipping in their Nikes—and two weeks later it was revealed that she had an endorsement deal with Reebok. "We are confident in Erin's reporting ability and journalistic role," ESPN spokesman Josh Krulewitz told The New York Times. "If an instance of inherent conflict arises, we would obviously be transparent with the audience,
In November 2011, ESPN executive Keith Clinkscales preemptively sued ex-colleague Joan Lynch for defamation, hours before Deadspin reported what he alleged was Lynch's claim that Clinkscales had allegedly fondled himself while seated next to Andrews on a flight—an incident Andrews had allegedly mentioned to multiple people but chose not to officially take to HR in the wake of her stalking trauma. Clinkscales' attorney told the New York Daily News the claim was "ludicrous" and he vehemently denied the incident ever happened. Deadspin wouldn't confirm to other outlets that Lynch was its anonymous source quoted in the article. (Clinkscales went on to help launch Revolt TV with Sean "Diddy" Combs in 2013; he resigned as CEO in 2016.)
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In June 2012, Andrews left ESPN for Fox Sports, where she remains to this day as a college football and NFL sideline reporter, as well as part of the team covering the World Series, the MLB All-Star Game and the Daytona 500. In 2014, she decided more would be more, so she accepted the opportunity to replace Brooke Burke-Charvet as Tom Bergeron's co-host of Dancing With the Stars in 2014.
Andrews also started dating Los Angeles Kings player Jarret Stoll in 2012, so life quieted down for awhile. The Kings won two Stanley Cups while Stoll was around, in 2012 and 2014.
But in 2015, the roller coaster started up again. Stoll was arrested for alleged cocaine possession in Las Vegas that April and subsequently charged with a felony. He cut a deal to plead to two non-drug-related misdemeanors and was sentenced to community service; already a free agent at the time, he was not re-signed by the Kings. The New York Rangers signed him to a one-year deal in August 2015.
In an interview published in the October 2015 issue of Redbook, Andrews said of her future with Stoll, "I have no idea what tomorrow will bring. We're brought up thinking our lives are going to be a Taylor Swift song. Then you get older and wiser. You don't know what is going to bring you happiness."
She did know what she wanted eventually, she just wasn't willing to confirm that it would be with Stoll.
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