Exclusive: Phil Mickelson’s Long History of Misconduct

Phil Mickelson and Pat Perez have known each other since they were kids. The San Diego natives were never close friends but shared a mutual respect and long history. So it did not seem unusual that Mickelson made an effort to get to know Perez's wife, Ashley, after they married in 2014, when she was 27 and Pat was 38. The interactions began innocently enough, with Phil texting Ashley under the guise of friendship. As she told me in a recent interview, “I was so young and innocent. I’m just this girl from Oklahoma and it’s like, I can’t believe Phil Mickelson wants to be my buddy! And he’s sending me good morning texts! Looking back now, it definitely feels like I was being groomed.”

The 2015 Barclays tournament was played at Plainfield Country Club in Edison, NJ. Mickelson stayed nearby in a swank villa at Liberty National Golf Course, where he’s a member. The Perezes were at a sushi restaurant when Mickelson called Ashley—not Pat—to say that he had arranged for them to move to his expansive villa. The Perezes gathered their belongings and headed to Liberty National. That night, Pat and Ashley stayed up drinking red wine with Phil on the patio of his villa, enjoying the view of the Statue of Liberty and the twinkling lights of Manhattan. When Pat excused himself to use the restroom, Ashley says Mickelson took out his phone and showed her a full-body picture of himself naked with an erection while flexing one bicep. Claims Ashley, “Phil says to me, ‘I’m going to leave my bedroom door open tonight. When Pat falls asleep I want you to come see me.’"

She demurred, and did not say anything to her husband when he returned from the restroom. “We were staying next door to Phil,” she says, “and Pat still had to play in the tournament. I didn’t want it to get messy.” She told Pat about the photo at the conclusion of the tournament. He did not confront Mickelson directly but, over time, Pat told so many folks about what had allegedly happened—and they in turn told so many other people—that Mickelson’s genitals became an urban legend on Tour. Mickelson ultimately apologized to Pat during a corporate outing at the Madison Club in La Quinta, California.

The ugliness spilled into public view in November 2022, when Pat went on Claude Harmon’s podcast and said, “I have a different hate for Phil than most people. And people won’t know the story—I’m not gonna go into the story again—but Phil crossed the line with me that is just uncrossable and unforgivable. He knows that he screwed up. He apologized for the action, but I cannot forgive him for it." When those comments went viral, Mickelson called Pat to apologize once more. Ashley still has a recording of the call and allowed me to listen to it.

Throughout the 26-minute phone call, Mickelson alternated between contrition and saying he didn’t remember the details of that night. When Pat laid out the story that Mickelson had shown “a naked photo” of himself to Ashley, Phil responded, “You mean topless?” Pat became increasingly irritated on the call at Mickelson’s obfuscation, saying, “That’s a real problem. If you don’t remember these things, that’s a fucking problem. That means you’ve got a lot of fucking shit going on.” Without admitting what he had done, Mickelson apologized directly to both Pat and Ashley and said, “I can’t tell you how disgusted and embarrassed I am in myself.” Approached this week for comment, Pat said, “I’m not talking about Phil. I don’t care if he did or didn’t do something. None of my business or concern. Thank you.”

Ashley filed for divorce in 2023. She had been an enthusiastic booster of LIV Golf when Pat joined the renegade tour the previous year, but since the divorce, Ashley has taken a lower profile on social media. She is more focused on launching a charitable foundation devoted to maternal health and running three businesses she has founded: a medical device company, a ride-share app, and a spirits company. Once a full-time Tour wife, Ashley has successfully reinvented herself as a businesswoman and philanthropist. Why speak out about Mickelson now?

“There is a culture of silence that keeps women from coming forward,” says Ashley. “I want to give other women the courage to share their truth. With Phil, I feel like the pattern has been there for many years but people have been afraid to go public because it’s Phil Mickelson. We give these golfers so much adulation and money, they think they’re gods. They think they’re untouchable. Being a pro athlete doesn’t exempt you from behaving respectfully in society. With Phil, you’re dealing with an egotistical narcissist. I know the type—I used to be married to one. Phil will keep going until he gets caught. Actually, it takes more than that. If Phil's behavior is ever going to change, he has to understand the trauma he has caused so many people in so many parts of his life.”

The bill may finally be coming due. On June 11, Joel Beall and Tod Leonard of Golf Digest reported that, a few months earlier, Mickelson had been told to leave the grounds at The Farms Golf Club in Rancho Santa Fe, California, because of alleged "nonconsensual and inappropriate physical contact" with a female employee. A representative for Mickelson confirmed that he had resigned from the club after decades of being a member there. Mickelson's attorney Tom Clare muddied the waters by telling Golf Digest, "Any misunderstanding has been cleared up" and "there is a great deal of misinformation circulating..."

In fact, Mickelson's unceremonious ending at The Farms seems to be part of a larger pattern. In recent years, he has had abrupt departures from two other high-end golf clubs, the Madison Club and The Bridges in Rancho Santa Fe. Sources at both clubs say his personal conduct was a primary factor. Seventeen years after Tiger Woods's serial infidelities exploded into a tabloid-fueled scandal, his onetime rival may now be facing his own reckoning.

Skratch sent Clare a detailed request for comment. Mickelson did not address any of the individual fact-checking questions but Clare provided the following statement from a spokeswoman for Mickelson:

"Some of the allegations circulating about Mr. Mickelson are false, and others revisit mistakes he has already acknowledged, publicly or privately. Stacking the disputed claims next to the ones he has owned does not make them credible. It instead contributes to a false and misleading narrative.

No person, no article, and no book can present an accurate, complete, or personal story of the life Mr. Mickelson and his family have lived. His story, struggles, and recovery belong to him and to the people who have shared it closely alongside him.

Recovery is not a straight line. Throughout their 35-year relationship, his wife, Amy Mickelson, has supported Mr. Mickelson and their family with extraordinary grace, unwavering love, and the belief that people are measured not only by their failures, but by what they do to make them right.

Mr. Mickelson's priority is to become the husband, father, and man his family deserves. Right now, that means giving his full attention to a private family health matter. He understands that parts of his life are public, but his family's private matters are not."

It was horrible – I was sweating profusely. It felt like verbal rape.

Mickelson was once golf's most celebrated family man. He famously pledged to walk off the course at the 1999 U.S. Open if his wife Amy went into labor with their first child, and caddie Jim (Bones) MacKay carried a beeper all week, waiting for the call. The drama became an inescapable storyline at the national championship. (Amy had the baby the day after the tournament ended.) The 2010 Masters was a morality play in the pines. Woods was returning to public life for the first time since his sex scandal broke, and he received a haughty scolding from then Augusta National chairman Billy Payne, who said, “It is not simply the degree of [Woods’s] conduct that is so egregious here: it is the fact that he disappointed all of us, and more importantly, our kids and our grandkids.” Meanwhile, Mickelson’s wife and mother were both battling breast cancer, and he won that Masters for them. Amy, his sweetheart going back to college, was waiting for Phil behind the final green at Augusta National, and when they hugged the whole golf world cried along with them.

Three years later, Phil, at age 43, enjoyed what he had called his greatest triumph, winning the Open Championship. Amy and their three kids were there for a joyous group hug after Phil brushed in one final birdie putt. Being a paragon of family values was highly lucrative: Forbes estimated Mickelson’s 2013 endorsement income at $44 million; tack on $4.7 million in on-course earnings and he was the seventh highest paid athlete in the world.

But after that Open, the wins dwindled. Amy traveled less and less, guarding her health and preferring to stay at home and tend to the busy lives of their children. To some folks around Phil, he began to seem increasingly restless. "Somewhere around 2015, things began to change," says someone who was close to Mickelson in those years. "He began drinking more on the road. Lots of red wine. He had always been devoted to Amy but that also started to change."

During that period, Mickelson had dinner during a tournament week with friends. One of the women in attendance says, “Something felt off. He was behaving a little odd. Out of nowhere, Phil started asking the most inappropriate questions about my personal life and then propositioning me in graphic detail. He went on and on about how he had been fantasizing about me and all the things he wanted to do to me. It was incredibly awkward. The rest of us kept trying to change the subject but he was relentless. The more wine he drank the louder he got. There was a family at the table next to us and I have no idea what they heard. It was horrible – I was sweating profusely. It felt like verbal rape.” Two other members of the dinner party corroborate Mickelson’s behavior and lurid language.

Says the woman, “It’s shocking that he would try to take advantage of a friendship like that. It was very disorienting. You think you know someone and then they turn out to be a completely different person.”

Ashley Perez had a similar experience at a dinner with Pat Perez, Mickelson, Phil’s agent Steve (“Coach”) Loy and others. (This occurred before the alleged nude selfie incident.) “The conversation turned very dark and sexual because Phil kept taking it there,” says Ashley. “He was using two fingers to graphically demonstrate some of his techniques to me. It was incredibly inappropriate—we were at a nice restaurant with a lot of people at the table.” In the recorded phone conversation between Pat and Phil, Mickelson apologized if he had offended with his behavior at that dinner. Pat said he had enjoyed getting to know “a different side” of Mickelson and added, “I had no problem with the dinner at all. Coach did, but I didn’t.” (Loy did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Mickelson owned a one bedroom condo on the second story of the clubhouse of the Madison Club. Every December and January he would spend long stretches at the club to prepare for the coming PGA Tour season. I met Mickelson at the Madison Club in January 2017 to record a podcast. I found him in the bar, where he was holding court during a rip-roaring happy hour. His charisma filled the vast room. Upstairs, his condo had bachelor pad vibes: dark leather furniture, walls crowded with framed photos from his playing career, all manner of golf clubs strewn about. "I love this place," he said. "We always have a great time."

That gave Phil the time to sneak over to this guy’s house and have his secret rendezvous.

According to multiple members and employees of the Madison Club, Mickelson began regularly having at least one woman who was not his wife spend the night in his condo. On his way out to play golf he would order breakfast to be delivered to the condo—usually a veggie omelet and almond milk latte. Amy was not on the property at the time. Phil abruptly left the club in 2021 after a decade of membership. “He wasn’t necessarily kicked out,” says a senior member of the Madison Club’s management team. “It was more of a demand by Amy. We got a call from [Phil’s and Amy’s] wealth management firm: We need Phil’s place sold, gone, right now. Phil will no longer be a member at the Madison Club.”

In the wake of leaving the Madison Club, Phil consolidated a lot of his golf at The Bridges. The club was just a few minutes from the family home in Rancho Santa Fe. He had been given an honorary membership, the kind of perk reserved for a high-level touring pro, but Mickelson paid dues and used the club often. “Phil was a big presence around here,” says a longtime member. “Him and Amy and the kids used to have Thanksgiving dinner in the clubhouse.”

Mickelson became close with a fellow member at The Bridges who owned a big house overlooking the golf course, which Mickelson frequented. Another Bridges member who regularly played golf with Mickelson says, “Phil would give his phone to a young man in the pro shop and pay him $500 to drive around the course for three or four hours. Amy was tracking his phone; that way, she would think he was out on the golf course. That gave Phil the time to sneak over to this guy’s house and have his secret rendezvous.”

How does the member know all of this? “The kid from the pro shop told me.”

Yet another Bridges member clarifies, “It wasn’t just employees [Mickelson] gave his phone to, it was also members. He’d be like, ‘Hey, if it’s okay I’m gonna put my phone in your cart, I’ll catch up with you on the back nine.’”

The member who was friendly with the pro shop employee says, “Everyone at the club knew what was going on and eventually Amy found out, too.” Multiple sources reiterated they believed Amy had knowledge of Phil's escapades; Amy’s attorney did not respond to Skratch’s request for comment.

Mickelson became a ghost at the club and his honorary membership at the Bridges was eventually transferred to another San Diego native, Xander Schauffele. “I guess you could call it a mutual thing,” says the longtime member. “Amy didn’t think some of the people here were good influences. She felt, accurately, that a couple people here had been an influence on Phil doing inappropriate things with respect to his marriage.” Jim Miller, the general manager of The Bridges, declined to answer questions from Skratch, saying via email, “The club will not comment on Mr. Mickelson (or any of our members) or anything involved with his history at The Bridges.”

According to a former friend and golf buddy of Phil’s, the couple did intensive marital counseling after things came to a boil at The Bridges and Madison Club. “Phil is a fucking wild hyena,” says the former golf buddy. “Amy tried to put him in a cage, but that was never going to work. It was inevitable he would act out. What happened at the Farms was always going to happen, somewhere.”

There is a through-line in Mickelson’s behavior. “Phil does everything for the dopamine,” says the golf buddy. “That’s his downfall: The dopamine. Whether it’s the way he plays golf, all the gambling, chasing chicks on the road, going to LIV—it’s all based on this very deep need to have action at all times.”

Going all-in on LIV Golf was the biggest gamble of Mickelson’s career. He is a founding father of the tour and his absence this season has been jarring as LIV fights for its survival. The one-time social media muckraker has gone radio silent. Mickelson missed the first four tournaments of the LIV season citing a “family health matter” and, indeed, one of his children had been unwell, according to friends of the family. But Phil played in LIV South Africa, conducted March 19-22. “I talked to him in South Africa and he was really happy to be out playing,” says Dustin Johnson. “He looked good. I thought he was locked in for the rest of the season.”

Why did Mickelson stop competing on LIV? The situation at The Farms happened in mid-March and became a topic of conversation almost immediately in the gossipy golf world; when Golf Digest finally published its story, No Laying Up tweeted that “golf’s worst kept secret is out.” Mickelson skipped the ensuing Masters, citing the family health situation. On April 8, 2026, Wednesday of Masters week, Augusta National chairman Fred Ridley offered hopeful words for Woods, who was in rehab after yet another crackup in his personal life. But Ridley made no mention of the absence of Mickelson, a three-time Masters champion. Veteran readers of the tea leaves took this to mean Ridley had heard the unsettling claims about Mickelson, feared they might go public soon, and wanted to distance himself and Augusta National from Mickelson. A month after the Masters, Mickelson skipped the PGA Championship, again citing the family health matter. When I asked 1996 PGA Championship winner Mark Brooks if Mickelson was missed at the annual past champions’ dinner, he said, “Not to disparage Phil, but I would say no. It just didn't really come up.”

How do Mickelson’s contemporaries really feel about him? “If he had walked into that room, the temperature would have dropped about 10 degrees,” says Brooks. “It would have been a chilly reception.”

The Farms, The Bridges, the Madison Club, gatherings of golf greats…there are now so many places where Mickelson is no longer welcome. He has left in his wake a number of destroyed friendships. He and his caddie of 25 years, Bones Mackay, had once seemed like brothers but they no longer speak, owing to an incident that Mackay refuses to discuss publicly. Mickelson was once friends with a stockbroker named Gregory Silveira. Owing $2.75 million to an offshore gambling operation, Mickelson asked Silveira to handle the payment; Mickelson transferred the money to Silveira, who sent it to the offshore account…and the stockbroker was then busted by the Feds for money laundering and sent to prison; no charges were filed against Mickelson. Phil once had a father figure in Billy Walters, but Walters now hates him with a passion, due to Mickelson’s refusal to testify on Walters’s behalf in a 2016 insider trading case. (Mickelson had to return $1.037 million in “ill-gotten gains” to the government but was not charged with a crime.) Walters remains a popular member at the Madison Club and Rancho Santa Fe Golf Club. In the Phil-Billy split, the golf world sided with Walters: among the letter writers who successfully petitioned President Trump to commute Walters’ sentence in January 2021 were Mickelson’s former swing coach Butch Harmon, Phil’s former Ryder Cup teammate Peter Jacobsen and David Feherty, arguably the most popular golf announcer on TV back then.

Professionally, Mickelson is on the verge of being a man without a country, as LIV may go away next year. The PGA Tour (and thus PGA Tour Champions) has made it clear that he is not welcome: the “returning member program” that gave Brooks Koepka a pathway back to the Tour was narrowly tailored to include major champions from 2022 onward, a not-so-subtle repudiation of Mickelson, who won the ‘21 PGA Championship. That epic victory, when the 50-year-old Mickelson became the oldest man to claim a major championship, seemed like the sport’s ultimate victory lap. He should have become a beloved elder statesman, captaining Ryder Cups, sitting next to Jim Nantz in the CBS tower, eventually serving as an honorary starter at the Masters. But all of these honors now seem beyond his grasp.

“It’s a very sad story,” says Mickelson’s former golf buddy. “He should have been Arnold Palmer. Phil had the same charisma, the same star power. People loved him everywhere he went. My take is that he came to believe his own bullshit. He thought he was bulletproof, because his whole life he had always skated on everything. But, in the end, he had too many demons. He got consumed by his own darkness.”

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