Michele Tafoya speaking with attendees at the 2023 Young Women's Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas. (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore / Flickr)
A former NFL reporter said she was “so shocked” after a Senate candidate backed by President Donald Trump called her a “drama queen” on a 2023 podcast about her miscarriage.
Lisa Guerrero, an ABC “Monday Night Football” sideline reporter in 2003, spoke to the Washington Post for a profile of Michele Tafoya, Minnesota’s Republican Senate nominee, published Wednesday.
Tafoya faces Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan (D-MN) next week in a race that tightened sharply in October, the Post reported.
“I was so shocked at another woman — and a woman who had once held the job I did, who knew about the pressures of having 40 million people see your work live,” Guerrero told the Post. “I today cannot believe it, and I’m hurt by it.”
Guerrero said she had kept the miscarriage private because she felt traumatized and humiliated, and that Tafoya, whom she had never met, never contacted her, the Post reported. Tafoya’s campaign did not respond to the Post.
In January 2023, a day after Guerrero revealed in a memoir excerpt published by People that she had a miscarriage while working a 2003 game, Tafoya devoted an episode of her podcast to disputing Guerrero’s account.
“We worked in exactly the same era,” Tafoya said, noting she followed Guerrero onto the same “Monday Night Football” crew in 2004. “I’ve had multiple miscarriages.”
Yet Tafoya told listeners, “I have my hesitation about was this truly a devastating miscarriage.”
She held up her own losses as the measure of Guerrero’s, saying, “Trust me when I tell you, my best friends knew.”
“From what I understand from very, very good sources, Lisa Guerrero was an attention seeking drama queen during her tenure on ‘Monday Night Football,’” Tafoya said.
“I contend she was not tough enough if that’s what she really wanted to be,” Tafoya said of Guerrero’s goal of becoming “the Barbara Walters of sports.”
“Again, this is what you sign up for,” she said after reading aloud Guerrero’s account of radio hosts “talking about my breasts and sexual acts.”
Those remarks follow Tafoya into a race where she trails among women, and her pitch to them rests on an abortion position she did not define when pressed.
Flanagan led Tafoya among women 48% to 36% in an early October Morning Consult poll for The Daily Agenda, which found 17% of women undecided.
Tafoya calls herself “a pro-choice Republican” in a campaign ad, MPR News reported. But when a moderator at their Oct. 16 debate asked what “reasonable access” to abortion meant, she replied, “Reasonable access is reasonable access!” according to Raw Story.
“I’m in line with President Trump on this,” Tafoya said of abortion earlier this year on a conservative radio show, Bring Me The News reported.
Tafoya welcomed Trump’s support before the primary and then downplayed it as pressure mounted during the general election.
Tafoya urged Trump not to run again in 2022, then said on Fox News in 2025, “Clearly, I was wrong,” the Post reported. The day she launched her campaign in January, she said she would be honored to have his endorsement.
The same ad, released the week before the endorsement, said a senator should work for Minnesota, not “even the president,” according to MPR News.
The Post noted that Trump said last week that he had told aides to set up one or two Minnesota campaign stops to help his chosen candidates. None have been announced, and Tafoya has declined to say whether she wants him there.
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