Erika Nardini is the most controversial woman in sports media.

As the CEO of Barstool Sports, she is the mama bear of a wildly popular comedy and sports website that prides itself on aggressively bucking political correctness — with a tone some have called ­misogynistic.

Much of that swirls around the site’s founder, Dave “El Pres” Portnoy. Earlier this month, the Daily Beast published a story cataloging many of his worst offenses, including calling ESPN personality Sam Ponder a “f–king slut” and a “Bible-thumping freak” whose job was to “make men hard.” (He later apologized for the “slut” comment, which he made in 2014.)

In 2010, according to the piece, he posted a comment saying women in size-6 skinny jeans “kind of deserve” to be raped. Earlier this year, he told a 20-year-old employee that, in a few years, she’d be too ugly to be in front of a camera.

It’s enough to make some people wonder why Nardini is on board. In, April, Deadspin editor in chief Megan Greenwell wrote that the female CEO is a token used to “launder” Barstool’s rough image.

“There are people who say I’m just here because I’m female — and I think that’s the most sexist thing of all,” Nardini, 42, told The Post.

“There’s a very strong PC culture [that believes] anything outside of it should be silenced and should not exist,” she added. “My job as CEO isn’t to contextualize 2014 Dave’s words. I do think we’ve evolved big time.”

But creative license and free-flowing conflicts, said Nardini, are part of their special sauce.

“There’s a lot of disagreement and debate [within the office],” she said. “These situations play out publicly, and the transparency is freeing,”

Barstool was started by Portnoy, now 41, in 2003 as a daily betting publication in Boston. It then morphed into a blog that filtered sports and pop culture through an irreverent lens. The site “graded” teacher sex scandals based on the teachers’ looks and features scantily clad pin-ups called “Smoke­show of the Day.”

‘There are people who say I’m just here because I’m female — and I think that’s the most sexist thing of all.’

“We are a comedy brand, and I feel strongly about our ability to make jokes and make fun of the world,” Nardini said. “There’s times that you have to have thick skin to work here and have great stamina.”

In 2016, Portnoy sold the company to the Chernin Group in a deal reportedly worth between $10 and $15 million and hired tech veteran Nardini, a former chief marketing officer of AOL who beat out 70 men for the job. The New Hampshire native had been a fan of the site from its early days.

“I felt like Barstool was the way the guys talked, thought and related to each other. And Dave had this rare quality where he brought everyone along for the ride,” she said.

She has given up a lot to go along with him. “When I got here, I was removed from every board seat that I had,” said Nardini, who keeps her private life closely guarded other than to say she is married and has two children. “There was this impression that I had taken a very wrong turn in my career. [Some people] only saw controversy.”

Most recently, she was asked to speak at an event where the organizer, whom she declined to identify, edited her biography when introducing her.

“Everything I had done in my career related to Barstool was stricken [from the record],” Nardini said. “It was shocking.”

Since Nardini has taken the helm, Barstool has ballooned from around 12 employees to 122 (23 of whom are female). Revenue has increased by 795 percent and the brand is now valued at $100 million by Bloomberg. It features 25 podcasts, including Pardon My Take, which is ranked No. 1 on iTunes in the sports category, and is a regular interview stop for A-listers.

Nardini says this growth — and an extremely loyal fanbase — has made the site a target, but the brand isn’t revising history.

“Barstool has become something worth attacking. Most companies that existed 15 years ago . . . they’re dead or they’ve erased their history and are trying to be something new. Barstool is none of those things. Nothing is deleted,” she said.

Portnoy has nothing but praise for his CEO, calling her his “best hire.”

As for the site’s controversies, Nardini said, “I’m protective of spaces where people can create freely. One thing I’ve learned [here] is that it’s courageous to say what you think . . . [Barstool] isn’t for everyone but you don’t have to watch it. In today’s world, if people don’t like something, they think it shouldn’t exist.”