NEW YORK — One day last month, Tom McMillen, a 73-year-old retired NBA player and former congressman, got an email.

“I’m a producer for ‘Pablo Torre Finds Out,’” the email began, “which you probably know as one of the most popular — and thoughtful — sports podcasts in America.”

McMillen could probably guess why the producer was contacting him: The House of Representatives had just released a trove of 20,000 pages of documents from the Jeffrey Epstein estate. McMillen, years before, appeared in an infamous video of Epstein and Donald Trump partying in the early 1990s at Mar-a-Lago.

But the producer, Matt Sullivan, said Epstein would not be a focus.

McMillen agreed. When the episode aired in early December, it led with the video from Mar-a-Lago: “For more than a year,” Torre said, “I’ve been thinking about one specific piece of [the Epstein] story: a video.”

The episode, which has been viewed more than 200,000 times on YouTube and won praise online, offers a rare instance of a powerful man having to answer questions live about a connection to Epstein.

In the episode, Torre acknowledges the invite and says they found McMillen’s name in the files, including in an Epstein flight log, after he agreed to the interview. McMillen, though, says he was tricked.

“The way they did it, I thought it was duplicitous,” he told The Washington Post.

That Torre, a former ESPN pundit, produced newsy reporting and turned it into an event is hardly surprising. Nor is it unusual that his subject is mad. His show became a phenomenon this year with aggressive reporting that uncovered seismic stories in American sports: details about Bill Belichick’s relationship with his young girlfriend, Jordon Hudson; a secret document that suggests collusion between NFL owners; a Chinese company that was allegedly reading the brain waves of athletes that launched a government investigation; and, most famously, allegations that Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer hatched an elaborate endorsement scheme to circumvent the NBA’s salary cap to pay a star player extra money.

To some of the subjects of his reporting, Torre’s work can feel like a personal crusade. The Clippers maintain that the team did not break NBA rules. Hudson threatened to sue him, though on what grounds is not clear.

To Torre, the pushback is meant to undermine what he has, to borrow from his show’s title, found out.

“They’re playing a game that involves inherently discrediting journalism as a concept,” Torre said.

Regarding McMillen, Torre noted that the episode clearly registered his complaints and gave him multiple opportunities to comment: “When … you get access to these public databases in which he’s popping up, the question becomes: Am I the type of journalist who’s going to make that even bigger and even focus on that because I think that’s the most important part of the story?”

Torre has become almost as ubiquitous among online sports fans as Dave Portnoy (Barstool) and Pat McAfee (ESPN), and he has done it in improbable fashion: by morphing from a talking head into an investigative reporter. Even as others pull away from that work, he has used it to deliver gripping narratives, plot twists and mystery. And he has leaned into his role as a main character, combining the job of reporter with that of online influencer, sparring with other journalists and critics.

The result is something entirely new. Nieman Lab wondered whether Torre is the future of watchdog journalism. McAfee, on Torre’s old network, ESPN, called him “a weapon.” This year, the Athletic, owned by the New York Times, signed a deal to distribute the podcast, and Semafor promptly dubbed him the Times’s ‘first creator.’”

Torre, 40, has collected his share of critics. Bill Simmons, who heads his own sports podcast empire, made fun of his Hudson “media tour”; another Athletic podcast devoted a segment to critiquing his reporting on the topic. Mark Cuban, the former owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has questioned the Clippers story. Inside the Athletic, reporters and editors have discussed whether Torre might push a story too far and whether that could impact their brand.

Whether this is institutional pearl-clutching, professional jealousy or prescient worry remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Torre keeps rolling. His editorial calendar is filled for months, his audience is growing, and he has more tips than he can vet.

“Everybody is understandably open to the possibility that this might go horribly wrong for me, and I encourage them to stay tuned and find out,” Torre said over lunch in Manhattan this fall. “There is fundamentally just this question of: ‘Am I trustworthy enough? Do I have the credibility?’ And that’s okay because I’ve done the work.”

A man walked by and yelled, “Get ’em, Pablo!”

Torre beamed.

BEFORE LUNCH, TORRE sat at the head of a table in a conference room in Lower Manhattan, going over an editorial calendar with his team of around 10, which includes production staff and an editorial team.

Torre, who alternates between investigations and whimsy, had interviews lined up with a Japanese porn star; sports power couple Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird; and Wyatt Cenac, a comedian formerly of “The Daily Show.”

Torre also was negotiating an in-studio appearance by Cuban, who, despite no longer owning a controlling share of an NBA team, became the lead online defender of the Clippers amid Torre’s reporting. “He is enthusiastically coordinating this in ways that continue to both baffle and delight me,” Torre said, looking more delighted than baffled. (Cuban’s in-studio appearance fueled internet chatter for days.)

The directive from Torre was always to set the audience up for a reveal, a strategy he learned from a kid named Ryan, whom he had watched open gifts on YouTube.

“There’s this psychological phenomenon that I had never thought about before,” Torre explained. “He has one of the most popular channels in the history of YouTube. And I was just thinking, there’s something about watching someone else be surprised and delighted by something inside of a box.”

Why, he thought, couldn’t that theory apply to journalism?

When Torre dropped his first episode about Belichick and Hudson in May, he invited Katie Nolan, a sports media personality, and Michael Cruz Kayne, a writer for Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, into the studio. In the episode, Nolan gasps as Torre unspools his findings — most notably that Hudson, who became famous for a domineering appearance with Belichick during a “CBS Sunday Morning” interview, had been banned from North Carolina’s football facilities, which the school denied.

Several months later, Torre did it again with his bombshell about the Clippers and their star, Kawhi Leonard. He surrounded Amin Elhassan and David Samson, two former pro sports executives-turned-podcasters, with stacks of documents and gave them folders to open at his direction, including the details of Leonard’s endorsement contract.

Samson, in an interview, recalled reluctantly entering the studio with no idea what to expect.

“I knew very quickly that I was looking at something that was going to cost the NBA money,” he said. “Now I just trust Pablo.”

Torre, borrowing from role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, described himself as the dungeon master, laying out a road map of exhibits for his guests and audience. As he piled up episodes on the Clippers (five parts) and Hudson (three parts), they became anticipated events, akin to an addictive Netflix series.

But fundamentally, Torre said, the draw is his reporting.

“Journalists maybe stopped appreciating how cool their job is,” Torre said. “It’s like, wait a minute; you guys are basically detectives if you’re actually reporting s---. Bringing people into the process is like bringing them into a movie.”

TORRE GREW UP in Manhattan. He is the son of two doctors, both Filipino immigrants. He graduated from Harvard in 2007 and thought about law school but instead took a job at Sports Illustrated as a fact-checker. He wrote a big story about athletes going broke and was hired away by ESPN the Magazine. He transitioned to TV, becoming a rising star in an era when the network’s shows were still populated by writers.

Torre was a precocious, baby-faced foil to some of the more bombastic talking heads. His big break came when he became the co-host, with Bomani Jones, of a show billed as a smarter complement to some of the network’s other fare. The show was canceled after two years, and Torre transitioned to a daily morning podcast. But with opportunities at ESPN shrinking, Torre joined former ESPN executive John Skipper and TV host Dan Le Batard at their new media company, Meadowlark.

“Pablo Torre Finds Out” launched in September 2023 as a three-times-a-week offering and part of the DraftKings TV network. It was advertised as a trip into the rabbit holes of Torre’s brain and had a budget of more than $1 million, backed by the gambling company. It delivered both slickly produced and delightful episodes about death row inmates connecting with their favorite sports teams, streaking and competitive birdwatching.

The show was a critical hit, nominated for a Peabody Award, but because it never talked about games and the episodes were so disparate, it was hard to carry the same audience from one to the next.

The Hudson episode changed everything. Torre delivered a scoop and then found ways to keep the story in the news. Simmons quipped that he had never seen anyone take credit for less reporting. Torre turned it into more content by going on Simmons’s show.

“I didn’t like his Belichick stuff and said so. He disagreed,” Simmons, an avowed New England Patriots and Belichick fan, told The Post in a text message. “So we did a pod and argued about it, and we both enjoyed it and got to a good place.” He added: “I also thought the reporting Pablo and his staff did on the NFL Players Union and [Clippers owner] Ballmer was great.”

Torre’s Clippers scoop fueled a similar cycle as he dedicated two episodes to debates with Cuban.

“Journalism has had a problem where it does not speak up for itself enough,” Torre said. “And fundamentally, I just won’t apologize for that. And so if I’m going to come off like an influencer in that regard, this is what I have made peace with in 2025.”

The show’s deal with DraftKings ended over the summer, and Torre looked for a new partner. He spoke with several companies, including Vox, iHeart and Apple, and landed on a multiyear licensing deal with the Athletic worth seven figures annually.

Today, the show’s numbers keep increasing: It has five straight months of more than 1 million views on YouTube; nine of the top 10 performing YouTube episodes have debuted in the past three months. Video licensing agreements on Netflix and spin-off docuseries with other streamers have been discussed. Hollywood studios and big-name producers have called about optioning the Clippers story. (Meadowlark chief executive Bimal Kapadia said Torre’s show is on the verge of profitability.)

The Times thinks highly enough of Torre as a brand ambassador to have invited him to its recent DealBook conference. Higher-ups have lauded his work.

“There are very few people who are journalists and entertain. Pablo does both,” said David Perpich, the Athletic’s publisher. “People want connections with people. And I think that for the institutions that matters; it brings additional trust.”

The link is a marriage of the ultimate legacy media company and a cutting-edge reporter fluent in modern media. But it required an unusual arrangement.

Underneath the McMillen episode on Torre’s Athletic podcast feed, there is a disclaimer: “The views, research and reporting … do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.” The disclaimer appears on several of Torre’s most controversial episodes, distancing the company from some of his work.

Torre said the Athletic can make suggestions on episodes but it’s his decision whether to accept them. Perpich said: “He shares our journalistic values, even if they don’t have the exact same standards.”

Inside the Athletic and the Times, several reporters and editors questioned whether they would be able to publish Torre’s episodes in the same form. It wasn’t a factual question, they said, but investigative reporters at the Times company typically don’t mix reporting and opinion the way Torre does, such as describing his Clippers reporting as a “smoking gun.” They also wondered whether they could publish a story in which so many anonymous sources criticized the subject, such as in Torre’s reporting about Hudson.

Asked whether Athletic reporters could publish the same stories as Torre, an Athletic spokesman wrote: “Pablo publishes according to his editorial standards and our publishing decisions are based on the standards of The Athletic.”

Another Athletic-distributed podcast, “The Sports Gossip Show,” suggested Torre was picking on Hudson after he devoted a third episode to her in which he published a leaked video of her complaining about graphics for a TV show that never aired. “This isn’t salacious,” said Madeline Hill, one of the show’s hosts. “What are we doing here?”

Jake Fischer, a longtime NBA reporter who writes a Substack newsletter and has covered the Clippers story, said: “I find it dangerous to approach stories with a conclusion and work backwards versus starting with a hypothesis and testing it with an open mind because it creates this dangerous dynamic where you’re just setting out to flame people as opposed to setting out to find the truth.”

The critiques bother Torre because he takes his process so seriously. For contentious episodes, a lawyer sits in the studio and makes corrections as he records, the same way a lawyer at the Athletic or The Post might review a story.

“My conclusions about the Clippers were the result of seven months of fact-checking, thousands of pages of documents and hours of interviews with federal witnesses,” he said. “But it remains the long-standing right of sports media to prefer a status quo premised on access and safety instead of dangerous journalism.”

“The fair critique is I’m a magazine writer, so I have a sense of narrative,” he said during another interview. “But any minimization that this is a racket based on slick requests and standards we can’t pass, I would just say get the documents. We get the documents.”

Fox Sports host Nick Wright praised Torre’s podcast but acknowledged the approach can be polarizing.

“It’s clearly more thoughtful than a lot of current sports media content, and it involves real journalism. With that said, I would find it more enjoyable if it was presented with a little less self-reverence and smugness,” Wright said.

That may also be part of its success. Torre combining his scoops with his media strategy has worked.

“Getting the attention is table stakes for success,” said Tim Miller, a former political operative turned writer and podcaster at the Bulwark. “And Pablo is everywhere. He is in your lives, and you feel like he is omnipresent if you’re somebody that exists on the internet. He is doing that better than anybody.”

One afternoon, Torre sat in his studio after taping an episode with Ira Glass, the long-running host of “This American Life.”

His show had advertised a phone number and an email address, and the tips were flooding his inbox, from vast government conspiracies to someone asking Torre to dive into their homeowners association. He scrolled through the hundreds of messages, knowing he wouldn’t have time to vet them all.

“I live in fear every day that I’m missing the next great story,” he said.

The previous sports media entity to have this cultural impact was Deadspin. The digitally savvy Gawker Media blog, whose popularity peaked in the 2010s, mixed high and low culture, leaned heavily into adversarial reporting and existed outside a traditional newsroom — all traits it shared with Torre’s show before Gawker Media was sued into extinction.

“I hope we don’t get f---ing sued by Hulk Hogan,” Torre said when asked about the comparison.

But Torre liked the association because Deadspin was known for challenging sports’ sacred cows in tough and mischievous ways. Torre likes to say he takes the serious silly and the silly serious.

Torre also noted a key difference: “We are probably more of a prestige whore than Deadspin. We love that we have an Edward R. Murrow or this Peabody [nomination],” he said.

It’s important to Torre that people understand how much time he spends thinking about journalism, making it, getting it right, but also defending the craft — especially in places that might be skeptical of it. He once went on rapper Joe Budden’s popular podcast and explained the point of his reporting on the Clippers and their billionaire owner: to hold powerful entities to account.

Torre also recognized that he — and his show — was being tugged in two competing directions, confessing that the internet and journalism don’t always reward the same values. For example: He could have gone to Clippers media day to create a spectacle for an episode but decided against it.

“If we lean further into the modern internet … in the way that the influencer incentives are telling me to do … that goes in one direction that’s probably, honestly, more financially sound as a strategy,” he said. “Meanwhile, what is going to undermine my credibility with the journalists who I still really do respect and want to approve of what I do? I want those people to think this guy’s doing real s---.”