NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Riley Gaines spent the Thanksgiving holidays as she always does: running a Turkey Trot with her family, enjoying a traditional turkey feast, and the next day, going Black Friday shopping with her sisters, her mother and grandmother, followed by a trip to the Cheesecake Factory.
The ordinariness of the family rituals was interrupted only by the fact that Gaines was accompanied by her new baby daughter — and a level of fame that she could not have imagined just a few years ago.
Three and a half years after her collegiate competition with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas thrust her into the national spotlight, Gaines, 25, is still getting used to her new life, a life vastly different from the one she had envisioned when she was a University of Kentucky student planning to become an endodontist.
“I’m just a normal person,” she tells me at her farmhouse on 12 acres in Sumner County, about 20 miles from Nashville, as three ebullient Springer Spaniels jump onto the couch and compete for her attention.
In some ways, that is true: “Bluey” is on the TV, holiday candy is piled in a bowl, and there are rolls of wrapping paper under the coffee table, indicative that with Christmas a little more than a week away, there were still holiday tasks to be done.
And yet, sitting before me, wearing blue jeans and a gray sweater, is a young woman who just took her daughter to the White House, who is friendly with not just the U.S. president and his wife, but also the full range of household names in politics and in media.
This is a young woman who works in a soundproof studio just beyond her kitchen, a studio in which she records her OutKick podcast and prepares for multiple television and radio appearances each week. Normal stops at that threshold.
For Gaines, it has been a dizzying ride from the NCAA stage where she stood next to Thomas in 2022, 21 years old and visibly uncomfortable in a royal blue University of Kentucky shirt as both athletes held trophies. They had tied for fifth place in the national competition, but the trophy Gaines was holding said sixth. Thomas would take a trophy home; Gaines was told hers would come in the mail.
It was a slight that bothered Gaines from the outset and would help fuel her rise to become a superstar on the political right — and a villain to some on the left. Detractors have called her a grifter who cashed in on a fraught issue — biological men competing in women’s sports. Supporters see her as a hero for fairness and women’s rights who risked her reputation, and even her life, by speaking out on transgender issues when they were still ascendant in the culture.
How does Gaines see herself?
The answer is found in her family life, its locus here at a gated Tennessee farm dotted with magnolia trees and thousands of daylilies.
There is also, of course, a pool — perfectly natural for a former competitive swimmer, but also emblematic of the deep water Gaines now finds herself moving through in the culture.
‘Family is everything’
When Gaines was a child, she accompanied her father on a business trip to Nashville, and while there, he took her to the hotel pool and told her to jump in.
It was winter. The pool had been covered for the season. Riley was in the second grade.
As she recounts in her memoir, “Swimming Against the Current,” her father told her, “It’s time you learned mental toughness, Riley.”
She did as her father asked, and when she climbed out a few minutes later, “My lips were so purple it looked as if I had eaten a grape Popsicle,” Gaines wrote. When the ordeal was over, her father explained: “Whatever you decide to do with your life, Riley, whether it’s sports or not, just know that having mental toughness is going to get you farther than physical toughness ever will.”
Theirs was a family of athletes. Gaines’ father played football for Vanderbilt; her mother played Division 1 softball. Riley — the second child of four — would start swimming at age 4, and she was swimming competitively by age 8. She writes in her memoir that she had “good genes” when it came to swimming: “big hands, big feet, and an athletic build.” But she was also gifted in other ways: She had what’s been called “two-parent privilege” — a strong and exceptionally close family — and the sort of looks that cameras love and Hollywood rewards.
If Gaines’ detractors at times say she has a “deer in the headlights” look about her on TV, it’s because her blue eyes are so large, set in a perfectly symmetrical face. Today, she wears small gold earrings, a gold cross around her neck. The only bling is on her fingers: glittering rings that include an engagement ring her husband, Louis Barker, designed using one of his mother’s gemstones, and a ring that was a “push present” Louis gave her after their daughter was born.
They were married about three and a half years ago; Louis knelt before her and proposed the day after the NCAA meet where Gaines tied with Thomas. It was a moment that took precedence over everything else that was happening in her life — one that still does.
When Gaines first saw her future husband at the University of Kentucky, she says she knew immediately he was “my person.” She broke up with her boyfriend back home in Tennessee that day, and told her friends that she wanted to date this other freshman swimmer, who’d come to the University of Kentucky from England — from the U.K. to UK.
He proposed in March of 2022; they were married by May — another turn of events that Gaines hadn’t seen coming. She’d planned to go to dental school after graduation, and didn’t want to be engaged and living in two different cities while she was in school.
But, “the moment he got down on one knee, it was like, who cares about practicality? Seeing him on one knee, I thought, this trumps anything else — any hoop or hurdle, we can jump through. Seeing him on one knee, (I knew) we could get through anything. So that was that.”
The wedding was small, just their immediate family. Louis, who had one brother and divorced parents, would later be shocked at the size of the Gaines clan. At their first Thanksgiving together, she says, “He goes, ‘Riley, there are like 75 people here.’ And I’m like, ‘This isn’t even the whole family.’”
Marrying Gaines meant staying in Tennessee, and assimilating to the South and its culture. He took up hunting — Gaines comes from a hunting family and, like her siblings, got a gun from her grandfather on her 21st birthday. Born and raised here in Sumner County, she says she can’t imagine living apart from her family; indeed, they are part of her everyday life. Six days a week, she joins her parents, younger sister and grandmother at a local gym where they work out together.
“Family is everything,” she tells me, cuddling baby Margot, born in September with a shock of dark hair that surprised her parents.
“It makes everything else seem so mundane. Especially when you have a child of your own.”
‘Where’s Gaines?’
There was nothing mundane about Gaines’ match-up with Lia Thomas, the University of Pennsylvania swimmer who had begun collegiate competition as a male and lined up against Gaines as a female, unaware that this 200-yard race would become a watershed moment in the nation’s culture wars, launching Gaines on a new career path.
It took Gaines a few months to realize this as well. But her stardom came on fast, enabled in part by her appearances on Fox News, the first of which came on April 5, 2022.
The left-leaning, Fox-disparaging website Media Matters for America tracked Gaines’ appearances on Fox, and concluded that between April 2022 and May 2023, Gaines had appeared on the network 29 times.
The Podchaser website, described as an IMDB for podcasts, lists her podcast appearances over the past four years. From Glenn Beck to Bill Maher, Piers Morgan to Jordan Peterson, to Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, it’s hard to find any show she hasn’t been on.
Even so, when she went to CPAC in Dallas in the fall of 2022, Gaines said she wasn’t scheduled to speak but was there as an observer, there to learn. She told me she was shocked when a man wearing a dark suit and an ear piece approached her and told her the former president would like to speak with her.
Donald Trump was speaking that day.
She was escorted to a back room where she spoke with Trump for 15 or 20 minutes, at one point, defying the Secret Service’s orders not to pull out her cellphone. (When agents protested, Trump told them it was fine; the selfie is still on her phone.) It was, she said, “a normal conversation” — one person asking another about their experiences. It’s just that the person asking the questions happened to be the president of the United States.
Before she left, Trump told her they had a place for her to sit, right in front of the stage.
Later, during the president’s remarks, she was startled when he called her up on stage, saying, “Where’s our beautiful, great swimmer? Gaines! Where’s Gaines?”
“He calls me up on stage in front of thousands of people, no forewarning. I was shell-shocked,” she told me. “I was 22 at the time. No experience with public speaking. ... He gives me a hug and says, ‘Say a few words.’ I don’t know what I said. ... I saw black. Hearing what I was saying was the first time I knew what I was saying.”
It was, however, a pivotal moment, one that made her realize her life wasn’t really going to be “normal” again, no matter how many normal things she does.
“OK, I think this is a big deal. And the president thinks this is a big deal,” she was thinking.
Later, she was gratified when Trump made transgender athletes one of his campaign issues; “Keep men out of women’s sports” was No. 17 on the GOP’s 2024 agenda.
The invitations continued to pour in. She became a regular on podcasts, radio shows and cable news. She gave speeches. She spoke to lawmakers who wanted to draft legislation and showed up at news conferences about women’s sports, including one in Virginia earlier this year.
She got involved with Turning Point USA; Charlie Kirk offered her advice and encouragement. People at Fox News were particularly supportive, she said; the issue resonated with their audience. “They were one of the first to say, whatever you need, any resources, any guidance, we’ll be there for you.”
About a year later, she signed a deal with OutKick, a subsidiary of Fox, to do a podcast called “Gaines for Girls.” Her book “Swimming Against the Current” came out in 2024. And last week, OutKick announced that Gaines has signed a new, multiyear contract, and will rebrand the twice-weekly show to focus on a wider range of topics with a new name. “The Riley Gaines Show" will premier Jan. 7, ensuring that Gaines’ degree in human health sciences (she graduated summa cum laude) won’t be put to use anytime soon.
But Gaines said she has a message that people want to hear and that the various forms of media are the best way to broadcast it. And her message is no longer just about transgender athletes competing in women’s sports — that battle, she says, is essentially won, with a large majority of Americans saying they’re against it.
“The thing about this issue is, it’s very unifying. Despite how it’s painted, despite how it’s talked about, 90% of the public believes that men shouldn’t be involved in women’s sports.”
A New York Times/Ipsos poll earlier this year found that 79% of Americans said that biological men should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports.
The day we spoke, Gaines was still mulling what she would say when she spoke at AmFest, Turning Point USA’s event in Phoenix. She was thinking that she should talk about the importance of family. (Indeed, she went on to talk about how becoming a mother made her more “radically pro-life.”) It’s not that she wants people to come to her side politically — she wants them on the side of common sense, she said.
Gaines acknowledges that she’s still learning how to best communicate with people, learning how to feel more natural in front of a microphone and camera.
“It’s becoming more natural to me, but it wasn’t, and maybe still isn’t, overly natural. I think there are some people who really have a calling to be in front of a camera. ... But there’s a need, and I’m willing to fill that need, even if it means I’m growing in front of people, and they get to witness what this growth looks like.”
Facing danger
When Charlie Kirk was shot in Utah Sept. 10, Gaines was at Chick-fil-A with a friend — another example of the ordinary-extraordinary bifurcation of her life. Here she was, in a public place, enjoying a meal with a friend like millions of Americans do everyday. But the call she took at the restaurant that day was about what had happened to a personal friend, and it was a fresh reminder of the danger that she faces at the forefront of one of the most contentious issues in American life.
She has been threatened and maligned so much online that she says it rolls off her back, like the water in her backyard pool, now covered for the winter, like the hotel pool Gaines’ father asked her to get in.
She says she’s been spit on and had drinks thrown on her. When speaking at a Turning Pointing USA event at San Francisco State University in 2023, she had to be sequestered with police protection for several hours before she could leave. Online altercations with people such as Simone Biles attract haters, as well as supporters, people like JK Rowling and Megyn Kelly regularly come to her defense.
But Riley’s propensity for speaking her mind, regardless of who she might upset, has also shown her how quickly even fans can turn on her. She learned this most recently when she wrote on social media that she was disappointed by President Trump’s social-media post about the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife. “I hate to see this,” she wrote on X.
“I thought the tweet was totally insensitive and in terrible taste. I don’t know why he does that, because it’s really hard to defend that. And I’m someone who wants to defend our U.S. president, but when you do something like that, especially given what has happened with Charlie Kirk, and the culture of violence that we live in ... I thought it was in terrible taste.”
“But you say that, and then you have people comment say, ‘I didn’t expect Riley to come out against Trump, she loses my support’.”
The mental toughness that her father worked to instill in Gaines helps her deal with the social media vitriol and unflattering news coverage like the recent Mother Jones article and accompanying podcast that Gaines said was a “smear campaign.” The article painted her as a creation of MAGA, questioned why she had not been as outspoken about alleged sexual harassment by a University of Kentucky coach as she was about transgender athletes, and said she commands speaking fees up to $25,000.
Gaines did not speak to the reporter or answer the questions she posed, but responded to the piece on her podcast.
She answers critics who say she is doing everything for the money by pointing out that much of her advocacy has been on her own dime. She said on her podcast that she has spoken to legislators and other groups without compensation, often when she was terrified to do so. She did so, she said, because “I understood it as necessary and timely and urgent and righteous and just and moral and just the right thing to do.”
There are, Gaines says, “fringe minorities” on both the left and the right that drive online vitriol — although she added “I think it’s much more on the left.” She doesn’t consider herself one of them, and says she is not beholden to any one side. “There is one true King, there is one Savior, and it’s not President Trump,” she said. “So I have no problem in calling things out when I see them, even if it means burning a bridge.”
People warn her of consequences, but she said she doesn’t care about that. “I’m not trying to climb a political ladder. ... I do what I do and say what I say because I think it’s the right thing.
“It just reminds me that moral conviction is just a totally foreign concept to some people. No one pays me to say what I say, unless it’s a partnership already aligned with what I think. I can’t be swayed one way or the other. ... What matters to me is everything when you close this gate this way,” she said, gesturing to the front yard. “My family.”
She feels safe here, in a deep red state, with family around here constantly. When she travels, she’s often accompanied by her husband and baby; they don’t have an au pair or a nanny, but juggle their schedules around Margot’s care. As for what’s next, she’s still figuring that out. She’s just recently had time to think about what she actually wants to do, as she moves into an expanded podcast with the opportunity to talk about a wider range of topics. Her approach to life, as well as the security her family provides, means she doesn’t need to know everything right now.
“I’m not a person that stresses. I’m just not. I’m of the mind that everything will work out. In whatever fashion it will, it will work out exactly the way it’s supposed to,” she explained.
Kirk’s death was a shock, but Gaines says she doesn’t live in fear “because I don’t view myself as anything other than ordinary. And what a miserable life, to live in fear. That’s not the kind of life I want to live.
“And I don’t live in fear because I know we have a Lord and Savior who came to this Earth, who walked this Earth, who died on the cross for our sins and rose again three days later with the hope and the promise of eternal life. Knowing that, it’s like, bring it on. You can’t scare me with death. You just can’t.”
And with that, she turned to Margot, who was hungry and starting to fuss. The turbulent water, the deep water, of Gaines’ extraordinary life could wait. It was the ordinary that needed her attention.
