Kyle Filipowski’s Prom Photos Make Their Rounds Amid Wild Mormon Girlfriend Grooming Story, Which Another Brother Has Now Confirmed

The Kyle Filipowski story is getting stranger and stranger whenever new details surface. When one of his brothers and mother threw around the story that the ex-Duke center and newly minted Utah Jazz big man was groomed by his Mormon girlfriend, eyebrows across the basketball world were raised. Now another of Filipowski's siblings has come forward to confirm that this grooming narrative is, in fact, a real thing. https://twitter.com/RotoSurgeon/status/1806751447738179891 The story goes that Filipowski isn't dating a blood-relative cousin, but rather the child of a close family friend. He also was isolated from teammates at Duke and lived with his girlfriend off-campus. This latest update only further confirms my theory from Thursday when the story broke that part of the reason Filipowski reportedly struggled during pre-NBA Draft interviews with teams was because he was determined to get to Utah. The state has the most highly concentrated population of Mormons in the United States at over 68%. If Filipowski has indeed been manipulated by this woman since his impressionable teenage years — he's still only 20 as of now — what would've stopped him from self-sabotaging every interview, save for when he spoke with the Jazz brass? Anyway, lending further credence to the story is the resurfacing of Filipowski's prom photos with his girlfriend. You can see the date is May 21, 2022, when the photos were posted. Filipowski was born on November 7, 2003, making him 18 at the time. https://www.instagram.com/kyleflip/p/Cd1nP7_sHLP/?hl=en&img_index=1 Filipowski was in a relationship with this woman for a while before this, and she's approximately eight years older than him. Pretty undeniable at this point that something seriously f****d up went down here. Poor Kyle Filipowski. The fact that he's managed to flourish on the basketball court as much as he has and play at a blue-blood program like Duke is an achievement in and of itself. Being in such a toxic relationship creates all sorts of extraneous strains, pains, and stress that it becomes exhausting just to get through the day, pretending to be someone that you know, deep down, you aren't. It's one thing to be gaslighted and in the throes of a totally lopsided, years-long affair that one considers to be true love. It's another thing entirely to be groomed. Extremely disturbing to put it in the kindest terms. You also have to feel bad for Filipowski's family. To feel compelled to go public with this sensitive, explosive information means they must've exhausted all possibilities to reach out to Kyle. They certainly seem like good, decent people who just want to love him. Now I have to wonder if the Jazz can do the right thing by Filipowski — should they come to the seemingly inescapable conclusion that all this is true — and trade him out of Mormon Country. Filipowski couldn't escape his girlfriend's clutches without the reinforcement and prevalence of her uniquely warped version of her religion in the greater community. It'll probably even more challenging for Filipowski to break away in Salt Lake City.