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| Isiah's harassment trial heats up quickly - |
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tulsad
 Posted:
Thu Sep 13, 2007 12:31 am |
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Isiah's harassment trial heats up quickly
New York Post, Updated 4 hours ago
Knick President and coach Isiah Thomas can be a charmer with a crowd, but a former team executive suing him for alleged sexual harassment told jurors yesterday he's a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
"He was always starting sentences with the word 'bitch,' " statuesque ex-marketing veep Anucha Browne Sanders testified in Manhattan federal court.
"Bitch, I don't give a f- - - about the sponsors. Bitch, I don't give a f- - - about ticket sales. That's your job," Sanders quoted Thomas as telling her whenever she tried to involve players in promotional events for the failing team.
Sanders managed to maintain her cool in the courtroom, even as the seemingly unfazed Thomas bizarrely laughed while she talked.
Sanders, a senior vice president for the team from 2000 to 2006, acknowledged that in public, Thomas is "very pleasant and personable. He was the Isiah that we see."
But behind the scenes, the hotheaded coach, who joined the team in 2003, flew into frequent rages, dropping f-bombs and targeting venom toward her, the team's only female vice president, she said.
He also allegedly took aim at whites.
Sanders said that when she asked Thomas at one point to hand-sign letters to season-ticket holders, he spat, "I don't give a f- - - about these white people."
She said that prompted her to remind the coach that 80 percent of the team's season-ticket holders are white.
A 6-foot-1, former college basketball star, Sanders stayed composed as she recounted the alleged verbal abuse and her repeated complaints to her bosses.
But she finally cracked when she said Thomas suddenly flipped his approach - professing his love and suggesting they go "off-site."
Thomas first pulled her aside at a Christmas party in 2004, and the two had joined in a basketball game called "horse," Sanders said.
That's when Thomas told her, "I figured out why we have problems. It's because we're so much alike. I'm in love with you. It's like the movie, 'Love and Basketball,' " Sanders said.
"I said, 'You're out of your mind,' " Sanders said. "I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could. I was just nervous."
Sometime later, Thomas called Sanders to a meeting in his office, purportedly to discuss staffing issues, closed the door and gave her a "big hug," she said.
"He said, 'You know I'm in love with you,' " Sanders recalled. "I said, 'Isiah, we just need to figure out a way to work together. Where else do you have an African-American president of the Garden, an African-American president of the team and an African-American vice president?'
"It is a tremendous message to minorities that this even exists," a teary-eyed Sanders recalled saying, clearing her throat as she struggled to repeat his response.
"I want to take you off-site for some private time," she said Thomas told her.
In opening statements yesterday, Thomas' lawyer Kathleen Bogas denied that the Knick honcho had ever acted inappropriately toward Sanders, either verbally or sexually. She called him "nothing other than a total gentleman."
Bogas said Sanders didn't like the changes that Thomas made when he took over the team and "decided to lash out ... played the sexual-harassment card."
http://msn.foxsports.com/nba/story/7217512?MSNHPHMA
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Sparkly Tree
Joined: 19 Aug 2006
Posts: 10139
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| tulsad
Posted:
Thu Sep 13, 2007 12:33 am |
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Marbury testifies he found lawsuit 'a joke'
Associated Press, Updated 6 hours ago
NEW YORK (AP) - Knicks guard Stephon Marbury testified Wednesday in the case of a fired team executive who has accused coach Isiah Thomas of sexual harassment, calling the lawsuit absurd while downplaying an encounter with a drunken intern.
After hearing about the lawsuit brought by Anucha Browne Sanders, "I laughed," Marbury said in U.S. District Court. "It was more of a joke than anything."
Marbury admitted he once called Browne Sanders a "bitch" during a phone conversation with another team employee though he insisted, "I didn't have a reason not to like her."
Browne Sanders says she is owed her vice president position back and at least $10 million for enduring a sexually harassing workplace for five years. Her lawsuit claims she was fired "for telling the truth" about vulgarity and unwanted advances by Thomas, also a team president. Thomas has denied the allegations.
Taking the witness stand earlier Wednesday, Browne Sanders wept while telling the jury of five women and three men that Marbury and his cousins, also Madison Square Garden employees, were part of the problem.
The plaintiff cited a conversation with an MSG intern who confided that she was having a relationship with one of the cousins and had gotten drunk on an outing to a Manhattan strip club in April 2005 that included Marbury. The intern claimed that afterward Marbury lured her into his vehicle for sex, Browne Sanders said.
"She said she basically did whatever he asked her to do and she considered it to be consensual because she got in the car," Browne Sanders testified.
When he took the stand, Marbury admitted pulling up and asking the intern, "Are you going to get in the truck?"' He said she answered, "Yes."
U.S. District Judge Gerard E. Lynch cut off any more questioning on the encounter, saying more details wouldn't help the jury decide the case.
After Marbury finished testifying, he rode down 23 floors in a crowded elevator, saying to no one in particular: "Money makes you do crazy things, man."
Then he left the courthouse, smiling and singing a song out loud. When pressed to divulge more about his relationship with the intern, he instead commented cheerfully on a reporter's shoes.
http://msn.foxsports.com/nba/story/7215332
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Sparkly Tree
Joined: 19 Aug 2006
Posts: 10139
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| tulsad
Posted:
Thu Sep 13, 2007 12:37 am |
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THIS GUY REALLY CROSSES FOUL LINE
Andrea Peyser - New York Times
September 12, 2007
September 12, 2007 -- THE moment came somewhere between the time Isiah Thomas was said to call a woman a "bitch" and a "ho." Or maybe it was "f- - -ing bitch mother f- - -er."
In a courtroom that's rapidly transforming into a cross between a basketball arena and a rap concert, where lawyers enunciate words better left in the toilet and spectators grapple with whether synonyms for female genitalia may be repeated, it happened.
Isiah laughed.
Since his trial began this week on charges of sexual harassment, Thomas has demonstrated a healthy disregard for decorum, and a beautiful mouthful of dental work. It was no different yesterday.
Anucha Browne Sanders took the witness stand, towering over Thomas' 6-foot-1 frame in high heels. With beautiful diction, unerring grammar and the voice of a child, she unleashed the torrent of garbage she endured for two years.
"He was verbally hostile," she began about Thomas, whom she claims drove her from her "dream job" with the Knicks. All because he couldn't handle a woman with the fortitude, and height, to look him in the eye.
She said Isiah's diatribes against her began with the word "bitch."
"Bitch, I don't give a f- - - about sponsors," she said Thomas told her.
"He called me a bitch. He called me a f- - -ing bitch," she said.
Immediately, it became clear that Thomas - a man who grew from poverty into a spoiled, overpaid, potty-mouthed jock - had never seen anything like her before.
She is elegant. Educated. Well-spoken. And black. And as she spoke, eloquently and painfully about her abuse, I looked over at Thomas, who stared as if she were an exotic plant.
He was laughing.
I'm glad someone around here is having a good time.
I asked Anucha if she was nervous.
"I feel great, absolutely," she said outside court.
"I'm glad it's here, and I have a chance to clear my name."
Then she winked. "Stick around."
The problem with the notion that Sanders was canned for cause was destroyed by evidence she presented: Until Thomas came along, Sanders' performance evaluations were uniformly outstanding.
After he arrived, even the hired help - such as the cousin of Knicks star Stephon Marbury - were free to abuse. Hassan Gonzalves was fired after telling a woman on staff that he wanted her to perform oral sex on him
http://tinyurl.com/yrszos
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Sparkly Tree
Joined: 19 Aug 2006
Posts: 10139
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