NFL Player’s Penis Size Is a ‘Matter of Legitimate Public Concern,’ Says Court

In this newsletter, we believe in sometimes covering weighty issues surrounding sexual freedom or internet censorship. And other times, well, we’re going to discuss an NFL player’s penis size and whether his ex-wife had a right to discuss it on a podcast. A federal court held that she did—but that doesn’t mean you can go blabbing intimate details about your ex and expect to get away with it. Let’s look at why.

The case is Kalil v. Kalil, and it involves former NFL offensive tackle Matthew Kalil and swimsuit model/online content creator Haley Kalil, known online as Haley Baylee. The pair were married in 2015 and divorced in 2022.

“Haley’s remarks about the size of Matt’s penis and its impact on her health and marriage were remarks about a matter of legitimate public concern,” a court found earlier this month.

Let’s back up. Last November, Haley Kalil joined model and streamer Marlon Lundgren Garcia in Minnesota for a Twitch livestream that was later posted to YouTube. During a discussion about why she and Matthew Kalil divorced, Haley Kalil intimated that Matthew’s penis had been sized such that sex—and ultimately marriage—was difficult. Here’s how the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota describes the discussion:

After Garcia asked Haley a few more questions about her marriage and its dissolution, Haley typed a private message to Garcia into her phone—ostensibly to put the reasons for her divorce “into perspective.” As she typed, Haley remarked that Garcia’s face was “going to be hilarious” when he read the message. After reading the private message, Garcia thrice repeated “shut the fuck up.” Haley, nodding and smiling, said that she was being serious and that she tried “it all….[t]herapists, doctors,” even investigating “lipo type of shit.” Haley joked that her “life is a comedy and it writes itself,” and confirmed that the issue described in the private message was “the biggest factor” in the divorce.

As Garcia and Haley continued to talk, it quickly became obvious that Haley was referring to the size of Matt’s penis. “[H]e’s like 0.01 percent of the population, okay,” Haley said, adding that “[w]e tried everything…you’re going to be in tears type of shit.” Garcia responded: “That’s like one of the craziest stories I’ve heard.” Haley characterized the experience as involving “trauma I can’t put on the Internet,” but said that it was “just bad luck.” Again, Haley insisted that her ex‐husband is “such a good person” and “a really good guy.”

Later…Haley acknowledged that a certain aspect of Matt’s penis was “[t]otally fine” and “like, average,” but she then said (moving her hands along a horizontal plane) that “he was just…like two [C]oke cans stacked on top each other. Maybe even a third.”

Live your life such that the size of your genitalia is never the subject of a federal court case seems like sound advice for all of us. But rather than let this one go—it wasn’t like she said he was too small, for goodness sakes—Matthew Kalil sued Haley Kalil for public disclosure of private facts.

Under Minnesota law, this invasion of privacy tort applies when someone publicizes a private matter that is both offensive and not of legitimate public concern.

“Without question, Matt has plausibly alleged that Haley Kalil’s comments about his penis were publicized, were about a matter concerning Matt’s private life, and would be highly offensive to a reasonable person,” wrote U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz in his decision.

Whether Haley Kalil’s comments were an actionable invasion of privacy thus turns on whether Matthew Kalil’s penis size is a matter of legitimate public concern.

Schiltz held that it was—at least in the context of Haley Kalil’s reasons for divorcing him.

“For at least two millennia, the private lives of public figures have been of legitimate interest to members of the public,” he pointed out, adding that “one of the most famous works of history—Suetonius’s The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, written in 121—is a notoriously gossipy collection of biographies of 12 leaders of ancient Rome that includes many details about their sex lives.”

And while “public curiosity does not necessarily equate to legitimate public concern,” Haley Kalil’s comments were made “in the course of an interview in which she was being asked about her prior marriage and its dissolution,” wrote Schiltz. “Her comments—including her comments about Matt—were about her life, her marriage, and her divorce, all of which are topics about which her millions of followers have a legitimate interest.” They were “not vindictive or gratuitous.”

The takeaway here is that publicizing private facts about an ex-partner’s body parts might be protected speech in certain circumstances. But if neither you nor your partner are public figures, you should probably stay mum. And even if you are professional athletes or swimsuit models, you can’t just go comparing your ex’s body parts to soda cans willy-nilly. Put those Coke can comments in context, and make sure that context is of legitimate public concern.

In this case, “the court is 100% correct that a person cannot tell their life story without also simultaneously telling the story of those they interact with,” writes First Amendment lawyer Eric Goldman. But “the court treats all of Haley’s disclosures as equally permissible, a conclusion that isn’t obvious to me.”

Goldman offers these hypothetical statements:

[a] “We were sexually incompatible”

[b] “Matt and I went to doctors to see if we could find a way to make sex not painful, but they couldn’t help”

[c] “Matt’s penis was so large that sex was painful”

[d] “Matt’s penis was so large that sex was painful” (accompanied by illustrative hand gestures)

[e] “Matt’s penis is 10 inches long and 8 inches in circumference, and this made sex painful.” (Note: A Coca-Cola can is 4.83 inches high and 8.17 inches in circumference, so this is essentially what Haley was implying).

He suggests that it’s OK for Haley Kalil to have publicly said the first three, but that “the hand gestures and the Coca-Cola can analogy” go too far.

Goldman also suggests that the Kalils’ celebrity status is irrelevant here. “I think private individuals should be equally free to disclose statements [a]-[c] as part of telling their life stories, regardless of the celebrity status of anyone involved, and I don’t think the detailed disclosures in statements [d] or [e] should be fair game only because the described person is a celebrity,” he writes.

Considering the internet-enabled rise of the noncelebrity celebrity, setting permissible speech conditions around who is or isn’t sufficiently famous does seem to lead us somewhat into the weeds on this matter. Maybe to be safe—and certainly to be in good taste—you just shouldn’t discuss an ex-lover’s intimate parts publicly and in detail in the first place.

In the News

Match’s new trad-dating app: The company that owns Match.com, Tinder, and Hinge is relaunching a trad-dating app called Upward. It’s “formerly a Christian dating app but now a home for anybody who wants to settle down—the old-fashioned way,” writes Faith Hill at The Atlantic:

“This is modern courtship in action,” the company’s press release reads. “Women are clear about their standards, men pursue with purpose, and both move toward marriage together.”

Any number of other platforms let you date with the purpose of getting hitched, of course. On Hinge or Tinder or Bumble, you can indicate what type of relationship you’re looking for and whether you want children. I see plenty of people on dating apps openly calling for a soulmate, a spouse, a co-parent—and I’m in New York City, not Tuscaloosa. What Match is capitalizing on, though, isn’t simply a yearning for matrimony or parenthood. It’s leveraging what’s arguably a regressive streak in the culture: a tendency to romanticize the scripts that more Americans used to follow, which told them how men and women should behave and what they should value. Internally, Match calls Upward’s audience the “next-gen traditionalists.” Now the company is betting on them.

On Substack

The divorce decline is real—but there’s a catch. From Stephanie Murray:

Is divorce really declining? Or is our divorce data simply deteriorating? That’s the question the authors of this study set out to address. Combining data from the National Survey of Family Growth and the Health and Retirement Study, they track women’s divorce rates from 1970 to 2019 and compare them against federal vital statistics and other surveys. Ultimately, they conclude that the decline in divorce is legit: per their estimates, it’s been falling since about 1980. This trend holds even when you include separations in the divorce tally. Interestingly, though, once you include breakups among cohabiting couples, the decline disappears. The total breakup rate (including divorces, separations, and cohabitation dissolution couples) has, if anything, edged up since the 1980s.

This gets at one of the main paradoxes in discussions of marriage rates and modern romance: Marriage rates are down, but the marriages that do exist appear stronger. Some people still lament low marriage rates, but to me this seems like a good tradeoff. It suggests that fewer people are seeing marriage as so worthy a goal that it justifies settling for a bad partner or mediocre relationship, and that more people are taking decisions about who and whether to marry seriously.

The cohabitation bit here isn’t surprising, because cohabiting rather than marrying may be more likely in younger couples, couples where one or both partners are unsure about the relationship, or couples where one or both partners are more unstable generally. And all of those factors suggest a higher likelihood of breaking up. But it does complete a piece of this marriage rate and divorce rate puzzle, suggesting that many of what would have been marriages-turned-divorces are now simply cohabitations-turned-breakups.

Read This Thread

There is no good reason for mosquitoes to exist in wealthy countries today.

New technologies can get rid of the mosquito species that cause diseases like dengue, yellow fever, and malaria; and others can prevent them from carrying those diseases.https://t.co/VxjlSKFmLL

So why…

— Saloni (@salonium) September 29, 2026

More Sex & Tech News

• An innocent Tennessee grandma spent six months in jail after being identified by facial recognition technology as a potential lead in a bank fraud case. But technology didn’t put this woman in jail, writes Reason‘s Autumn Billings. “Bad policing did.”

• Operation Coast to Coast “is a privately coordinated and funded nationwide sting operation with local task forces mimicking” federal task forces, notes Tara Burns. She has more details on the arrests—largely for prostitution or solicitation—here.

• What would sex and marriage be like in a matriarchy? For one thing, “there seems to be less of an emphasis on lifelong monogamy within matriarchal societies,” Cartoons Hate Her reports.

• Katherine Dee reviews I Want to Be Famous: When Everybody and Nobody Is a Celebrity. “When it comes to the sometimes bewildering world of traditional celebrity—people who are on television, in movies, or making music—this is one of the best books on the topic I’ve ever read,” writes Dee. “But as much fun as I had reading I Want to Be Famous, there was something conspicuously missing: how the internet changed the nature of celebrity not just for celebrities as we understand them but for regular people.”

• “TikTok has agreed to pay Alabama at least $100m and enact time limits and other restrictions for teenage users, avoiding a trial with a settlement that was modelled on Instagram-owner Meta’s recent agreement with US states,” The Guardian reports. Reason‘s Meagan O’Rourke comments:

At best, government-imposed social media restrictions are acts of political theater; users are often savvy enough to work around them. At worst, they’re chilling censorship orders. If more of these safety measures are enforced, entire swaths of the internet could become age-gated. Officials may feel that they are protecting children in their states by securing settlements with social media companies, but they’re making the internet less free for adults and pushing kids to less visible realms of the web.

• “Surveillance pricing” bans are a solution in search of a problem.

• The AI election?

The voters are now worrying more about AI overpowering human control, rather than worrying about job losses.

A shift from just half a year ago. https://t.co/RQvsJElYd4 pic.twitter.com/5E2RK4msUM

— Avery James (@averyfjames) September 25, 2026