The Rihanna incident highlighted how much has changed since the Chernin acquisition, but also how much has stayed more or less the same. The post was quietly taken down. But Portnoy also opined on the site that he thought the post wasn’t “as bad as many are making it out to be,” and that he was angry mostly because Spagnuolo had given “feminists” fodder to say “there goes Barstool being Barstool again.” And yet Portnoy himself cannot seem to stop personally offering up more and more of that fodder. A controversy last month, involving the terms of a contract offered to a sports personality named Elika Sadeghi, began on relatively professional footing. Within days, though, Barstool had released a seven-minute animated video in which a cartoon Portnoy says Sadeghi’s surname sounds like “the monkey from ‘The Lion King.’ ” It also portrays her hanging upside down over a boiling caldron.

I spoke to several women in sports media who have had run-ins with Barstool. All described the same pattern: They would tweet something critical of Barstool’s statements about women, which would prompt a response from Portnoy or one of his bloggers. Then came the swarm of Stoolies on social media, who would harass them with misogynist slurs and threats, often for days. Even random sports fans have been targeted. A few years ago, a Cubs fan named Missy suffered a brain injury after a fall; during her recovery, she found that she had trouble reading anything longer than a paragraph, so she moved her usual sports-media consumption over to Twitter. When she saw an article detailing the way Clancy and an army of Stoolies had responded to the Al Jazeera incident, Missy tweeted her support for the author of the article and women she felt had been abused online. Stoolies responded almost immediately, with three days of the usual misogynist epithets and vague threats. A year later, she says, after another comment critical of Barstool, a reader found photos she had posted memorializing a cousin who died of cancer — and reposted them on Twitter, tagging Barstool writers to do God knows what with them.

There’s a uniform response from Barstool employees about the worst of the Stoolies. “I hate seeing it,” Katz told me. “But it’s just a few idiots who have nothing better to do, and it sucks that people use them to smear an entire company.” The average Stoolie, Portnoy, Clancy and Markovich all argue, is not a misogynist abuser but has been painted with a broad brush by other media outlets. “I’m used to it by now,” Nardini said of the constant negative press surrounding Barstool’s attitudes toward women. “Every time anyone mentions us in the media, they’re always going to write that requisite paragraph.” She used to be part of a network of female executives, she told me, but “after they heard I was coming here, every single one of them dropped me like a bad habit.”

The wrath of the Stoolies can occasionally extend to Barstool’s own employees. “There wasn’t a single day that would go by without me seeing the N-word in the comments,” Maurice Peebles, Barstool’s first black employee, told me. Peebles ran Barstool’s Philadelphia page for three years. His administrator access allowed him to see that the racial slurs were coming mostly from a concentrated number of IP addresses, which meant that only a few readers were posting the slurs, and over time the site’s filters became better at blocking them. But he doesn’t absolve Barstool of all responsibility. “They could’ve done more about it,” he says. “None of the guys who worked at Barstool ever said anything racist to me, but I don’t know if they all understand what it’s like to see that word every day.”

Barstool’s reputation “was certainly listed as a risk,” Kerns says. “But I think time is on our side. The younger folks within agencies and brands get Barstool and recognize the world is increasingly taking itself less seriously.” Over the past year, that time seemed to have already arrived. Dunkin’ Donuts, the advertiser most associated with Boston sports, had long been wary of dealing with Portnoy, but this year, Barstool dedicated an entire month to promoting the chain’s new energy drink. Wendy’s had also expressed hesitation to partner with Barstool, but this summer the company sponsored “Barstool 5th Year,” a Snapchat channel specifically targeted at college students.

The question of whether Barstool should be held responsible for the worst behaviors of its fans reflects a fundamental question facing online media — the same one at the core of Facebook’s issues with fake news, Twitter’s with neo-Nazis and Reddit’s with various toxic communities. Unlike those companies, Barstool can’t hide behind the notion of being an open, neutral platform for the free speech of others. Its readers may come from all sorts of backgrounds, but the core Stoolies are an organic online community that grew under the caring, thoughtful hand of their very own El Presidente. Every new-media venture seeks out an “organic online community” like this — one that can, in Nardini’s words, “convert content into commerce.” That community could mean, say, subscribers of The Daily Skimm, an email for millennial women that recaps the news in a peppy, corporate voice. But it can also mean tribes of angry, disaffected young men who gather online to find shelter from the floodwaters of political correctness. This leaves companies like ESPN with a discomforting dilemma. Should they try to create their own communities — an almost impossible enterprise, especially with young audiences who have grown up on completely independent, unfiltered personalities on YouTube and social media? Or should they co-opt, sanitize and scale audiences like the Stoolies?

There are two distinct visions of how Barstool could work at the scale Nardini and Chernin envision. The first would involve running back into the understanding embrace of the Stoolies and building an uncouth, unapologetic brand aimed exclusively at boorish young men. Last August, Barstool purchased Old Row, a site that posts frat-boy fight videos and photos of college girls in bikinis and sells T-shirts celebrating the Trump presidency. This month, Barstool announced that it had bought Rough N Rowdy Brawl, an amateur boxing company from West Virginia that features untrained locals knocking one another out. In an “emergency press conference” announcing the acquisition, Portnoy thanked Ponder, saying the ESPN controversy had led to “the biggest couple weeks we’ve ever had.” “It does not matter if you like us, hate us, whatever,” he said. “We speak directly to our own consumers.”