On Sunday, golf champion Rory McIlroy’s wife, Erica Stoll, watched with the rest of the world as he clinched victory at the Master’s Tournament in Augusta, Georgia. After he walked off the green, he immediately went to Stoll who gave him a long hug, her wide-brimmed white hat covering her face. He then crouched down to pick up their 4-year-old daughter, Poppy, dissolving into tears as he buried his face in her curly hair.
The moment was lovely, thrilling, and altogether innocuous. But we aren’t living in a time where a woman like Stoll is allowed to move in public without scrutiny, and so this brief interaction has ballooned into something ugly.
Since her husband’s victory, Stoll has been the subject of gossip, innuendo, and outright hate in the media and online. According to these arbiters, there is a correct way to react when your husband achieves a lifetime dream, and Stoll’s poised and somewhat reserved response was far from it.
Based on this brief interaction, the world has now decided they know who Stoll is. She’s clearly a long-suffering scorned woman forced to pretend to love her husband in public, a cold and unfeeling partner who doesn’t recognize or care about the gravity of the moment, or a mix of both. The evidence for this is her (few) actions at the tournament, which are being construed as overwhelmingly negative. She covered her face with her hat during their embrace? Well, what’s she hiding? What about the apparent Patek Philippe Nautilus watch she wore on her wrist, one that she was clearly pointing at the cameras? Well that one’s rather obvious—she’s showing off the fact that she’s still got her husband in her clutches, his millions and all.
This narrative surrounding Stoll isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s part of a cultural creep of misogynistic judgement that increasingly means famous women can’t do anything without being scrutinized, and usually, criticized. In 2025, you must be the right type of wife, the right type of woman, the right type of mother, in order to escape this scrutiny. And the goalposts are changing every day, the sliver of acceptable behavior growing ever narrower.
Just look at the recent scrutiny on Michelle Obama, who faced months of rumors and divorce whispers for simply choosing to bow out of certain aspects of public life. For decades now, Obama has been the perfect politician’s spouse, accompanying her husband through his illustrious career and setting her own ambitions aside. She’s now finally able to set her own schedule and live in a more free way, and to some, that’s an anomaly so egregious, that they assumed something darker—like that she and her husband were getting a divorce.
“This couldn’t be a grown woman just making a set of decisions herself, right? But that’s what society does to us…We start actually going, What am I? What am I doing? What am I doing this for?” she said on the Work in Progress podcast on the issue. “And if it doesn’t fit into the sort of stereotype of what people think we should do, then it gets labeled as something negative and horrible.”
It would be easy to view these examples as one-offs or strange pop culture obsessions. But in the context of the current moment, they begin to take on a more sinister tone. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that Stoll is being torn apart for essentially not being the perfect wife at a time when large swaths of those in power seem to want to return women to a time when being a wife was one of the only things we could aspire to be.
Women are being stripped of their titles and in the most extreme cases, their rights. And even when we are attempting to fulfill the roles given to us by the old patriarchal systems, we are criticized for it. In many ways, Stoll is hemming closely to the ideal of what these systems dictate a “good” woman is supposed to be—she’s supportive, quiet, and steadfast (not to mention, beautiful). She’s not bucking the system or fighting against gender norms, and her husband is the prominent figure in the relationship. But in this current climate, even that is not enough.
Much of the scrutiny on Stoll seems to stem from the fact that last year, after seven years of marriage, McIlroy filed for divorce. The media soon pounced on the story, claiming he had hired a “private investigator” to serve Stoll and one quoting from the document’s legalese as “new details.” But a month later, the couple reconciled. In a statement, McIlroy acknowledged that there had been “rumors” floating around about his personal life, which he called “unfortunate.”
“Over the past weeks, Erica and I have realized that our best future was as a family together,” he said. “Thankfully, we have resolved our differences and look forward to a new beginning.”
Given Stoll’s steadfast appearance by McIlroy’s side at the Master’s, it seems that the couple has indeed worked things out, at least enough to continue to appear together as a family. We have no idea what actually happened in their marriage, but the one thing we do know is it was McIlroy who instigated the split, at least legally.
It’s even more absurd, then, that the gossip about the reasons for their brief breakup are largely being placed on Stoll’s shoulders. This is at least, according to “body language experts” consulted by tabloids like the Daily Mail and Page Six, who have picked apart every pixel and frame of Stoll’s actions of the Master’s and declared her wanting. One expert told Page Six that Stoll seemed “polite” as she congratulated her husband on his victory, calling the reaction “subdued.”
“Erica uses back pats, which are firstly a gesture of gentle affection but which also usually signal a desire to break from an embrace, while Rory appears much more clingy,” she claimed.
According to the tabloids, it’s obvious why Stoll would feel “subdued”—the “humiliating” divorce petition. But wait, there’s more! McIlroy, they claim, is rumored to have dated a CBS Sports reporter at some point during the split, which neither have ever confirmed. Adding to Stoll’s humiliation, then, is the fact that McIlroy did an interview with the reporter after his victory, and—gasp—didn’t mention his wife, just his parents and daughter. He was also spotted hugging a “mystery blonde,” mused another paper, who conveniently mentions a few paragraphs down that the woman is actually the wife of his competitor, Justin Rose.
I’ll be the one to ask the perhaps obvious question: why is the public not picking apart McIlroy’s reaction toward Stoll, especially since he was the one who filed for divorce in the first place? Imagine, just for a moment, that a woman athlete reconciled with her husband, and the press then tore him to shreds once they reappeared in public again, dissecting every frame of his actions to somehow determine he was to blame. It sounds absurd because it is. A man would never face this level of scrutiny.
This all begs another question. How exactly was Stoll supposed to behave when her husband won the Master’s? We have to assume that if she’d dissolved into histrionics, screaming and crying and clutching his chest, the commentary would have been equally condemning. Women aren’t allowed to emote too much either, and the headlines would have been filled with how Stoll stole McIlroy’s moment, how she clearly embarrassed him, and on and on and on. Should she have left her Patek Philippe at home? Worn a different hat? Or is it that she should have never let her relationship get to a point where its public cracks were exposed, because showing even a bit of vulnerability is seen as an open invitation for relentless scrutiny?
Here’s the truth: Stoll couldn’t win. Because if you actually watch her performance in her role as Rory McIlroy’s wife without any bias, you can easily see the truth. She did nothing wrong. Just because a woman may act differently than some may expect does not mean her actions are open for debate. But in 2025, that reality is becoming blurred in a way that’s troubling for all of us, no matter who we are married to.
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