Meg Radice and Audrey Jongens #

Introduction #

Meg Radice and Audrey Jongens are social-media influencers — the pair behind the Instagram account theviplist, with roughly 154,000 followers — whose US Open media credentials were revoked by the tournament in 2026 after they showed the credentials off in a video. According to The Big Lead, the online flex “was followed by immediate tournament action to promptly revoke those credentials.” The pair, who had blocked off both weeks of the tournament to create content, began publicly pleading for their credentials to be reinstated, telling TMZ they did not realize they had done anything wrong.

Background Information #

Radice and Jongens share the Instagram page theviplist, which had about 154,000 followers at the time of the incident. They were among a growing class of content creators credentialed by the US Open: the tournament began issuing media credentials to influencers in 2025, when it issued 54, and that number nearly doubled to about 100 in 2026 as tennis tried to grow its fanbase. The influencer program was itself a talking point at the 2026 tournament — some players, including Daniil Medvedev, embraced the move to include content creators, while critics argued it was driving away genuine tennis fans and replacing them with people there to sip Honey Deuce cocktails and record the experience. Radice and Jongens had planned to be part of the 2026 cohort, blocking off the entire two weeks of the tournament to attend and record content at all US Open events.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation #

Allegations. The account of what Radice and Jongens did comes from The Big Lead’s reporting on the episode; the credential revocation itself is confirmed tournament action, but the tournament did not publicly detail its reasons. Nothing was criminally charged or adjudicated in court, and the pair say they did not realize they did anything wrong.

The incident began when Radice and Jongens, allegedly excited to share their experience at the 2026 US Open, showed off their tournament media credentials in a video posted online. That was followed by immediate tournament action to promptly revoke those credentials, according to The Big Lead. The US Open did not publicly detail its reasoning, but The Big Lead reported that the tournament likely reacted swiftly because anyone could screenshot the credentials pictured in the video and produce a copy to gain entry to the grounds. Per TMZ’s reporting, cited by The Big Lead, the pair began making public pleas to the tournament to reinstate their credentials, saying they had blocked off the entire two weeks to attend and record content at all US Open events, and that they did not realize they did anything wrong.

Public Reaction and Consequences #

The revocation landed amid a broader debate over the influencer influx at the 2026 US Open, which had already produced friction inside the tournament. In a separate episode days earlier, the umpire at Naomi Osaka’s first-round night match had to address a group of credentialed influencers filming live video with lights as the match was being played, and the group came under fire for disrupting the match, with game officials reportedly chastising them. The Big Lead framed the Radice–Jongens revocation as “another example of credentialed influencers being disruptive at the tournament,” and argued some of the criticism aimed at the program — that the antics of credentialed influencers were tarnishing the tournament — was warranted. The episode fed the larger question The Big Lead posed of whether the US Open was losing some of its luster because of the influencer influx, and it noted it was unclear whether the tournament would continue to embrace influencers at the same level in future years.

Current Status #

As of The Big Lead’s September 2026 reporting, the pair’s credentials remained revoked, and their public pleas for reinstatement had not resulted in the tournament restoring access. No legal action was reported by either side; the matter stood as a credential-access decision by the tournament rather than any adjudicated dispute, and the US Open had not publicly detailed the reasons for the revocation. Radice and Jongens continued to maintain through their public pleas that they did not realize they had done anything wrong.

Impact on Their Career/Life #

The immediate consequence for Radice and Jongens was the loss of their US Open media credentials and, with them, the content plan they had built two full tournament weeks around — access to all US Open events that they had blocked off specifically to record. The episode also tied their names to a turning point in the tournament’s influencer experiment: after the credentialed-creator corps nearly doubled from 54 in 2025 to about 100 in 2026, their revocation became a prominent example in the debate over whether the program was worth the disruption critics said it brought. For influencers generally, the case illustrated how quickly credential access can be pulled — and how little recourse creators had, with the tournament acting immediately and publicly explaining nothing, per The Big Lead’s account.