You just knew that when Stephon Marbury stepped into the witness box something good was going to happen. He spent the summer giving wonderful interviews, blogging up a storm and selling his shoes from coast to coast. There was no way his testimony in the Isiah Thomas sexual harassment case was going to be a dour affair. And indeed it was not, although the questioning had more to do with Marbury's sexual habits than anything that Thomas may or may not have done to Anucha Browne Sanders. Her attorneys asked Marbury about an assignation with a Knicks intern in a truck.
Hunched in the hot seat in a stylish tan checked jacket, Marbury 'fessed up to crassly luring the college student into his vehicle outside a strip club, calling out, "Are you going to get in the truck?"
He said she answered, "Yes."
"It really wasn't a conversation," said the cocky team captain, admitting he knew the woman was an intern but denying he was aware she was drunk.
They proceeded to have sex in the parked car and follow-up questions hinted at an ongoing relationship between the two before the judge stepped in to remind the lawyers that Marbury wasn't a defendant in the case at hand. The only reason it went that far is because Browne Sanders discussed the incident in her own testimony saying that the intern told her she "wouldn't have gotten into the truck but felt like she had to" because Marbury was doing the asking. The intern also said that the sex was consenual, though, and Sanders' account of the incident featured different details than Marbury's.
The intern, who still works for the Knicks, was dating Marbury's cousin at the time of the strip club soiree. Said cousin was at the heart of the poor relationship between Marbury and Sanders because she fired him as a Knick employee after he falsified timecards and sexually harassed another colleague. Sanders claims she told the team about the incident with Marbury but they failed to do anything about it, something she says illustrates the atmosphere of harassment inside the organization.
Perhaps they didn't investigate it because it seems like two adults having sex in a parked car. I'm not saying that the girl might have felt Marbury was powerful or that he acted like a true gentleman but nothing in the account from yesterday raises much of an eyebrow. She was probably drunk, he probably acted like a cad and that goes on each and every day in bars and at parties all across the country. What that has to do with the Knicks as an organization is beyond me? It wasn't a Knicks team party at the Mt. Vernon strip club, after all, and are we really supposed to be shocked to find out that NBA players treat women like disposable objects?
It is just sanders trying to throw as much dirt out there as possible. The Marbury consensual sex has nothing to do with her case. She is trying to imply that he is rapist. She can go to hell for that. Then she tries to imply that Isiah is a racist. Trying to appeal to whatever white jurors on the case. She is blatanly just going for the money. I hope they give her nothing.
Posted by: JoeWhoCares | September 17, 2007 at 02:08 PM