Mike Vrabel and Dianna Russini were spotted together inside Tribeca Tavern in New York City in the early hours of March 11, 2020, and an eyewitness said the pair were kissing and “all over each other.” The photos were taken around midnight, and the two stayed at the bar for at least an hour.
The eyewitness told Page Six that Vrabel “had a ring on,” a detail that landed differently because he was married to Jen at the time. Russini had not yet married Shake Shack executive Kevin Goldschmidt, whom she would wed six months later. At the time, Vrabel was the head coach of the Tennessee Titans and Russini was working as an NFL reporter at.
The scene was not built for public attention. Russini had posted a photo of herself in ’s New York studio with Laura Rutledge just hours before the outing, captioning it, “A blonde. A brunette. And a red head walk into a bar…” That post now sits beside the bar photographs as part of the same night in New York, a night that drew a fresh round of attention six years later.
Vrabel told he would miss Day 3 of the NFL draft to enter counseling, saying he had promised his family, the organization and the team that he would give them the best version of himself. He said he had committed to seeking counseling starting that weekend and added that he wanted to lead by example and be “the best husband, father and coach” he could be. The New England Patriots later said they fully supported his decision to put family and well-being first, and that Eliot Wolf and his personnel staff were prepared to execute the draft as planned.
The tension in the story is not hard to see: the March 11 photos were made public long after the outing itself, and the reporting tied them to Vrabel’s later admission that he was entering counseling while the Patriots moved forward with draft preparations. The photos were also described as six years before a later scandal involving Vrabel and Russini holding hands and hugging at an Arizona resort, but the March 2020 images stand on their own as the earlier moment now pulling renewed scrutiny. What remains clear is that both were already married into different lives, and that the night in Tribeca did not stay in Tribeca.