Cable TV anchor Stephanie Ruhle received a private phone and email account from Under Armour boss Kevin Plank through which they communicated at all hours, according to newly unsealed court documents.
The MSNBC host was also sent a secret recording of a conversation that Plank had with another Under Armour executive about the company’s finances, according to court papers cited by the Wall Street Journal.
In 2019, the Journal was the first to report details of the unusually close relationship between Ruhle, who was then a financial news anchor with Bloomberg Television, and Plank, the 51-year-old billionaire who made his fortune after founding the Baltimore-based sports apparel giant.
The latest details about the nature of the relationship between Plank and Ruhle emerged in unsealed court documents linked to a lawsuit filed by Under Armour shareholders against Bloomberg, where Ruhle worked from 2011 to 2016 before moving to Comcast-owned MSNBC.
During a deposition earlier this year, Plank, who stepped down as Under Armour CEO in 2019 though he remains the company’s executive chairman, was asked to describe the nature of his relationship with Ruhle.
“She’s a confidant,” he said.
“I would give her counsel on her career and she would give me counsel on things I was dealing with that were either banking or media or human nature in relation.”
In her deposition, Ruhle acknowledged receiving a phone from Plank that was separate from her personal device as well as her work phone, according to the Journal.
She also said in her deposition that she took numerous trips with Plank on a private jet.
“We were friends and I covered his company,” Ruhle said in the deposition.
When asked if she was flying with Plank in her capacity as a friend or as a journalist, Ruhle said in the deposition: “I was flying on his plane as myself, Stephanie Ruhle. I’m not really in a category one or the other.”
Ruhle, who worked as an executive at Deutsche Bank before transitioning to a career in journalism in 2011, was known to take trips with Plank on a private jet and even gave him public relations advice while she was anchor at Bloomberg, according to the shareholders’ lawsuit against the media company.
The close ties between the two, both of whom are married, sparked speculation among Under Armour executives that they were having an affair, but a company spokesperson denied this, saying they were friends.
“As we’ve said, Mr. Plank has utilized outside advisers and that’s what these documents show,” an Under Armour spokesperson told the Journal.
“None of the information was used improperly.”
An MSNBC spokesperson declined to comment. Bloomberg News also declined to respond to Post inquiries.
The Post has sought comment from Under Armour and Bloomberg News.
The shareholders, who filed suit against Under Armour, allege that Plank and other executives artificially inflated the company’s share price even though they knew that sales were weaker than the value of the stock indicated.
The plaintiffs in the case are seeking to force Bloomberg to turn over Ruhle’s emails, but a federal judge in Manhattan denied the request, saying that Ruhle’s function as a journalist rendered those communications privileged, the Journal reported.
Bloomberg was subject of a tangential proceeding related to the class action lawsuit against Under Armour. The news company was not named as a defendant in the lawsuit.
Under Armour has called the claims “meritless” and added they “are being defended vigorously.”
In May 2021, Under Armour agreed to pay $9 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle claims that it misled investors about its revenue growth.
The SEC found that Under Armour failed to disclose to investors that it employed a sales tactic to accelerate or “pull forward” a total of $408 million in existing orders in the second half of 2015 after a warm winter began to hurt sales of the company’s higher-priced cold weather apparel that customers had requested be shipped in future quarters.
With Post wires
