Seven Times More Death Threats. Per Player. In Two Years.
The WNBA is the most-watched women's sports league in American history. It is also, according to threat intelligence firm Moonshot, the most targeted. Between the Paris 2024 Olympics and the Milano-Cortina 2026 games, athletes in the league received seven times more threats of violence per player than in the preceding two-year period, five times more non-consensual intimate imagery, and twice as many credible threats escalated to law enforcement. Those numbers are not drawn from a single viral moment. They represent a sustained two-year trend. Now the Chicago Sky, for the first time in the WNBA's 30-year history, has hired the same kind of experts governments call when they need to counter terrorism.
Threats of violence per player (2-yr change)
7x increase
Non-consensual intimate imagery incidents
5x increase
Credible threats escalated to law enforcement
2x increase
Threats targeting women athletes (Olympics dataset)
90%
Threats targeting athletes of color (Olympics dataset)
80%
The Company the Chicago Sky Called
Moonshot was founded ten years ago to help governments fight terrorism and violent extremism. It developed software to detect radicalisation online, monitor credible threats, and flag individuals before violence occurs. Its current clients include national security agencies. Now it is monitoring a basketball team. "It says a lot that here we are, 10 years later, taking that same methodology that we use to help governments counter terrorism and other targeted violence, and we are now having to apply it to sport entertainment," said Elizabeth Neumann, Moonshot's chief strategy officer and a former U.S. assistant secretary for threat prevention at the Department of Homeland Security.
The First WNBA Franchise to Work With PERIL
The Chicago Sky is also the first WNBA franchise to partner with PERIL, the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University. PERIL studies the conditions that turn online hostility into real-world violence. Its founder, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, draws a direct line between the targeted abuse WNBA players receive and broader patterns of male violence: "Misogyny is one of the biggest common denominators in gang violence, in stalking harassment." Moonshot's data makes the demographic breakdown explicit. The abuse is overwhelmingly aimed at Black women, and it targets identity rather than performance. A player does not receive death threats because she missed a free throw.
"It's just become a new world that we have to operate in. That we need to figure out how do we combat this level of abuse and harassment.
"Nadia Rawlinson (Chicago Sky co-owner and chairman)
What the Threats Look Like Off the Screen
The abuse is not abstract. A Texas man was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for stalking Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark. An Indiana man was charged with stalking Phoenix Mercury forward Sophie Cunningham. Sex toys were thrown onto courts during games in Chicago and Los Angeles. A former NBA player was ejected from a Sky game after a physical altercation with guard Natasha Cloud. Each of those incidents involves a real player who had to arrive at work, play a professional sport, and return home while the threat was active.
The WNBA Was Already Running Out of Options
The league launched its "No Space for Hate" platform in May 2025, deploying AI tools to delete toxic comments from players' social media feeds and revising its arena code of conduct. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert assembled a dedicated task force: social media monitoring, strengthened conduct standards, enhanced arena security, and dedicated mental health clinicians for every player. None of it was enough to stop the numbers climbing. "I just want my players to think about their one mission, which is to be the most competitive, best player that they can when they come out to the court every night," said Rawlinson. That sentence is now a security objective, not just a coaching philosophy.
What This Opens for the Rest of the League
The WNBA is in the middle of a commercial boom, with ticket revenue, TV ratings, and league expansion all accelerating. The violence problem is a direct drag on that growth. Players who feel unsafe cannot fully concentrate on the court. Executives spend budget on security that could go elsewhere. Fans who witness or hear about in-arena incidents think twice about attending. A sport that has to model its player safety programme on counterterrorism methodology has arrived at a different kind of inflection point than the one its broadcast deals suggest. The Sky's partnership with Moonshot and PERIL is the first attempt to treat the problem at the same level of seriousness as the threat itself. Whether it works will be visible in the numbers Moonshot collects. Those numbers have been going in one direction for two years.