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Notre Dame guard Hannah Hidalgo apologizes for sharing anti same-sex marriage video

IMG_9992by:Tyler Horka•05/09/25•

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Notre Dame guard Hannah Hidalgo celebrates a three vs. Texas. (Photo by Mike Miller/BGI)

Summertime is supposed to be quiet for collegiate student-athletes. Peaceful. Not a lot of noise. Notre Dame women’s basketball guard Hannah Hidalgo invited plenty of pandemonium into her time off a year ago, though.

The racket is still ringing and reverberating 10 months later.

Last July, Hidalgo shared a video of right-wing political commentator Candace Owens calling the marriage of former CNN host Don Lemon, a gay man, a “sinful relationship.”

“Yes, you are sinning,” Owens told him. “You’re in a sinful relationship. I actually don’t believe marriage can be between two men.”

Hidalgo did not publicly address sharing the post until she authored a Players’ Tribune piece in early April. She went through Notre Dame’s entire season — one that has been characterized as an underachievement for it ending in the Sweet 16 when the team, formerly ranked No. 1 in the nation in February, had serious Final Four aspirations — without doing so.

In her article, Hidalgo admitted to the repost being a “mistake,” and she wrote that letting people down, giving the wrong impression and hurting people she cared about got her “spiraling.” She did not apologize or address any understandable rumors of homophobia, though.

In ESPN’s second episode of Full Court Press released last week, she did.

“What I reposted hurt a lot of people,” Hidalgo said. “I took it down, of course. I want to apologize to the people that I hurt because that is never my intention. I love everyone regardless of what skin color, what belief, what religion, regardless of what you think because the Lord calls us to love everyone.”

As for the other part of it — is she homophobic, ESPN asked?

“No,” Hidalgo said. “Absolutely not. Um, I’m — I have friends that are homosexual. I have teammates that I play with every single day, practice with them every day that are homosexual too. And that doesn’t stop me from loving them. I will go to war for any single one of my teammates, and they know that.”

In January, former Notre Dame head coach Muffet McGraw — a two-time national champion who has a statue of herself outside of Purcell Pavilion in South Bend, Ind. — addressed Hidalgo sharing the Owens-Lemon video on Instagram. She was critical of Hidalgo’s decision.

McGraw called it a “poor choice.”

“I thought that it was almost insulting to her teammates, to everybody in the game of basketball,” McGraw said on ESPN columnist Sarah Spain’s podcast. “I was really disappointed that it came out that way. I was happy that she deleted it, but the damage I think was done before she deleted it.”

ESPN reporter Holly Rowe — and plenty of others in the women’s basketball space — saw it the same way.

“It’s been a topic of players in the WNBA because the WNBA is known as the most inclusive league in the world,” Rowe said. “Nobody wants to tell Hannah Hidalgo what she should feel and what she should believe, but man, that is something that caught a lot of people off guard. She has to be aware of the surroundings and the people that she’s coming into contact with and that you’re going to be teammates with.”

Hidalgo is open about her devotion to Christianity. Rarely, if ever, does the two-time Associated Press First Team All-American let a press conference go by without reference her savior, Jesus Christ. It’s who she is, and she’s not walking that part of herself back in light of what’s happened. In fact, she wrote in the Players’ Tribune article that she deleted her social media apps and leaned even further into religion last summer at the height of her self-induced controversy.

But she did apologize once more for the fallout that was brought on by her repost.

“I don’t want anyone to think I’m apologetic for my faith, but what I am sorry for is that I hurt people and that I hurt people closest to me,” Hidalgo said.

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