U.S. women’s national team star Trinity Rodman detailed a fractured relationship with her father, NBA champion Dennis Rodman, who she said was both emotionally distant and created financial difficulties for his children during their youth.
The soccer player has been reluctant to talk about her father in public, alluding to a complicated relationship with the retired basketball star. On an episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast that was published Wednesday, though, Rodman finally went into length about her father. “He’s not a dad,” she said. “Maybe by blood, but nothing else.”
“With the dad situation, in terms of what I’ve filtered and what I’ve talked about, I feel like me and my brother have been very generous with the way that we’ve talked about it and very unselfish,” Rodman said. “I think we never want to make him look bad, and that is at the cost of holding in a lot, and a lot of issues we’ve gone through and just like, trauma, per se.”
Rodman, alongside her older bother D.J., and her mother Michelle Moyer, lived with her father in the early years of her life, but his lifestyle forced Moyer to move the family out of his Southern California home.
“My mom was really good at making every situation seem smoother than it actually was, and I think that’s what parents do to protect their children, but I think even being young, it was like he partied all the time,” Rodman said. “We tried to live with him, but he’s having parties 24/7, he’s bringing random bitches in…I still believe my dad hasn’t loved anyone after my mom. I genuinely believe that. I think he doesn’t know how to. I think they both felt the same way about each other, but it’s just, his demons were just too strong for it. I think my mom just saw the situation of, ‘We love each other, it’s not going to work and for my kids, I can’t have them seeing you treat me this way, embarrass me this way and have the party scene all the time. You have little babies.'”
Rodman said her father then essentially cut the family off financially, forcing them to live at one point in a Ford Expedition, later a motel and eventually sharing a room with her mother as a teenager.
“Growing up in a wealthy place when you don’t have money is a different struggle,” Rodman said. “I think that was really difficult for me, my mom and my brother We were going to the schools where everyone had money.”
Rodman said she and her brother would see their father at most four times a year when they lived in the same city, and during their childhood, money continued to be a complicated issue. He would accuse their mother of only being after his money, refusing to pay child support and offering his money in controlled environments.
“My dad, he likes to be in control,” she said. “He would take us shopping, get us phones, do this, do that. ‘I’m going to take you and your brother shopping!’ Me and my brother are like, ‘We don’t want to go shopping. We don’t want to go shopping. We just want money to get in and out after school with our friends,’ so it was like he wouldn’t give us money to do that. He needed to have the control of bringing us shopping and swiping his own card but but if we asked, ‘Can we have $100 to go get food, go to Claire’s to get my ears pierced?,’ little stuff like that, he was like, ‘No. You’re using me,’ all this stuff.”
She attributed his strained relationship with his family and his money to the bad influences around him, as well as a substance abuse issue.
“I think with how successful he was and how rich he was, he was surrounded by a lot of toxic people who would take his money and take advantage of him and ’cause he was in alcohol, he was kind of brainwashed in all that, didn’t really have control over anything,” she said. “We tried to be that foundation and to be the good people around him because in reality, we never really asked for anything unless we really needed it. Me and my mom and my brother, it was like, ‘We just want you,’ and I think for him, he’s never understood the fact because he’s never experienced it. He’s had messed-up family issues as well. He’s never understood that people could just want to be around him and to just want to make him happy. He’s always thinking, ‘Money, money, money, money.'”
Impact on her soccer career
Rodman said that the financial difficulties growing up made it difficult at times to be a young soccer player, which remains an expensive extracurricular for many families across the country.
“With soccer and everything, we got a lot of help from one of my club coaches, Greg Baker,” she said. “He kind of set me up and helped me. Thank god I was talented or else I don’t know where I would be, but he helped me and he gave me those opportunities that I wouldn’t have had because I couldn’t pay for certain things, so a lot of things, we worked for but also in a way were handed just because we were talented, so that did help. Especially with sports, it was very difficult to travel and go to hotels and do these away trips and have the money to stay at these Marriotts. We were at Holiday Inn. That’s what we could afford.”
Rodman’s father remained uninvolved as she became a promising USWNT prospect and then became one of the NWSL’s first players to skip college soccer altogether, eventually being drafted by the Washington Spirit in 2021. Her father surprised her by turning up to the Spirit’s playoff quarterfinal against the North Carolina Courage, a realization she made midway through the game. It was the first time they had seen each other in months, causing an emotional reaction. She leaned on then-teammate Ashley Sanchez during a first half water break, while then-head coach Kris Ward also asked her if she wanted to continue to play, which she did.
“When he showed up at my game, I was, like, so mad,” she said. “I started crying on the field. So I’m trying to play the soccer game and I’m crying. … I was so mad. I was like ‘You took this happy moment from me. You f—ed with my head again. I’m walking over there so mad, like ‘F— you.’ I walk over there, he grabs my head and I just start bawling into his arms as if it’s a daddy-daughter [moment].”
She later made an Instagram post about the moment, which went viral, hoping for a new beginning with him but her father then went months without contacting her again. The pair still speak infrequently, in part because her father frequently changes his phone number, but Rodman picks up his calls in an act of sympathy despite describing him as “an extremely selfish human being.”
“I think now, even hearing his voice is painful because I think it’s missing him mixed with – he’s an alcoholic, and again, that’s something that I don’t want to say but I’m just like, f— it,” she said. “It’s the truth and, even the past five years, hearing the difference the way his sentences go together, I’m like, he’s gone. It feels like he’s gone and hearing him talk – I answer the phone now for my conscience, to be like, if something does happen, god forbid, I want to know to know that I did that, or if he needed to hear my voice before anything happens. That’s why I answer the phone – not for me.”
