The Benny Johnson Show told its audience this weekend that Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham "got nearly murdered" in Friday night's game against the Chicago Sky, that she was "completely bloodied" and "left with a mouthful of blood," and that the play was "assault" and "racial assault." None of the published reporting on the game describes any injury to Cunningham at all, let alone blood [1][2]. The racial framing collapses even faster, because Cunningham herself, speaking on the record after the game, said the play had "nothing to do with race" [2].
Here is what actually happened. In the August 8 Fever-Sky game, Chicago's DiJonai Carrington struck Cunningham in the face as Cunningham went up for a layup. Officials stopped play, reviewed the contact, and upgraded the call to a Flagrant 2, the league's most serious in-game foul classification. Carrington was ejected [1]. After the ejection, Carrington posted the phrase "White Privilege" on Threads [1][2].
The video is not wrong about everything, and the parts it gets right deserve saying plainly. The foul was real, and it was violent enough that officials reached for the harshest penalty available to them in the moment. The ejection was real. Carrington's post-ejection social media post was real too, and it genuinely injected a racial dimension into the discourse around the play, from Carrington's side, after the whistle [1][2]. A commentator who said only that much would be on solid factual ground.
Everything past that point is invention. Neither the Yahoo Sports/AP account of the game nor the Fox News/Outkick follow-up, an outlet with no institutional reluctance to cover WNBA controversies sympathetic to Cunningham, reports any injury [1][2]. No blood, no "mouthful of blood," no medical attention, nothing. Cunningham was available to reporters after the game and spoke at length [2]. A player who had nearly been killed on the floor two hours earlier would be a materially different story, and no outlet that watched the game filed it.
The deeper problem is what the video does with Cunningham's own voice, which is to erase it. Asked about the racial dimension after the game, Cunningham said: "This has nothing to do with race." She pointed to her own history with the same call: "Last year, I did the same thing and I got kicked out." She added that "I deserved to be kicked out" applied to her own ejection then, and closed the thought with "There's no reason even to play that card" [2]. That is the alleged victim of a "racial assault" rejecting the premise in four consecutive sentences.
Notice the inversion the video performs. The only racial content in the actual record of this play came from Carrington's own post, which Cunningham was asked about and declined to escalate [1][2]. The video takes a racial framing that Cunningham explicitly refused and straps it to her anyway, because a bloodied white player racially assaulted on national television is a monetizable story, and a hard foul followed by a standard league review and an ejection is a Tuesday. The invented injuries serve the same function. "Nearly murdered" retains an audience that "Flagrant 2, upgraded on review" would lose.
The record here is unusually clean, which is what makes the video's version so stark. The game tape, the officials' review, the league's penalty, Carrington's post, and Cunningham's post-game comments all fit together into one coherent account, and every participant's words are public. The claims rate False: Cunningham was not "nearly murdered," was not "completely bloodied," was not "left with a mouthful of blood," and the person best positioned to call the play a racial assault, the woman who took the hit, said there was no reason "even to play that card" [1][2].
