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djsunyc
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Sexual Harassment Suit Filed Against Thomas and Garden
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
A former high-level Knicks executive filed a lawsuit yesterday accusing Isiah Thomas, the team's president, of sexual harassment and discrimination, saying he had made unwanted advances, cursed her and barred players from working with her on community events.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan, the executive, Anucha Browne Sanders, said that Thomas refused to stop his actions despite her protests and discomfort, and that her immediate supervisor, Steve Mills, the president of Madison Square Garden Sports, did nothing to intercede on her behalf.
Last Thursday, Browne Sanders was fired as the team's senior vice president for marketing and business operations after an in-house investigation by the Garden found her complaint to be "unsupported."
Browne Sanders, 43, said in a telephone interview yesterday that she had found her dream job with the Knicks, whom she joined in 2000. Now, she said: "I'm outraged at the termination. I feel they've destroyed a stellar sports career."
She named Thomas and the Garden as defendants in the lawsuit, which charges them with two counts of sex discrimination and two counts of retaliation. She is seeking reinstatement and unspecified damages.
Ron Green, the Garden's lawyer, called the lawsuit "fabricated and outrageous." He said that Browne Sanders was fired "because of an inability to fulfill professional responsibilities," and said she "is now seeking a financial windfall." He said the Garden had a policy to prevent a hostile work environment, and called Browne Sanders's claims "baseless allegations."
In their statement, Thomas's lawyers, Peter Parcher and Sue Ellen Eisenberg, called the lawsuit a "cynical attempt to get a large sum of money from Madison Square Garden by taking advantage of the celebrity status of our client, who had no day-to-day interaction with her." Garden officials referred all questions for Thomas to his lawyers.
Parcher and Eisenberg accused Browne Sanders of demanding, as a condition of her departure, a $6 million payment, more than 20 times her salary.
"That statement is false, as the lawyers who made it should know," said Judith P. Vladeck, one of the lawyers for Browne Sanders.
The Garden, and two of its officials, are defendants in another sexual discrimination suit. In October 2004, Courtney Prince, a former captain of the Rangers' ice-skating cheerleaders, charged that she was harassed and then fired after she told other skaters that she had been solicited for sex by a public-relations manager for the team during a postgame encounter in a bar. The case is awaiting a decision on a motion to dismiss one of its claims.
Browne Sanders - a star basketball player at Northwestern and the fourth-leading women's scorer in Big Ten history - said in her lawsuit that the work environment within the Garden changed drastically soon after Thomas was hired in December 2003.
She described in court papers several occasions in which Thomas berated her coarsely, once after a Knicks loss the day after a community event she had organized, and another time during a meeting with Mills and Thomas, who she said made his remarks when Mills left the room.
Browne Sanders, who worked for I.B.M. before joining the Garden, said that Thomas spoke of her crudely to members of his basketball operations staff, telling them not to take directions from her.
In late 2004, she alleges, Thomas's hostile behavior changed to making sexual overtures. After one game, she said in her lawsuit, he hugged her tightly and told her he had figured out why they had problems. He said he was "in love" with her and they were "so much alike." She said that he compared his feelings for her to experiences the characters had in the film "Love and Basketball."
She said that he once told her: "I know you think I'm inappropriate. But I'm in love with you."
Last month, she charges, he again tried to kiss her, and when she pulled away, he said, "What, I can't get any love from you today?"
She said that she had made clear that his advances were unwelcome.
Browne Sanders's suit alleged that Thomas's attitude toward her was mirrored by the star point guard Stephon Marbury. In the suit, she asserted that other Garden employees informed her that Marbury had made derogatory comments about her.
When she told Mills about Marbury's remarks, according to the suit, she said that Mills warned her that if she kept making sexual-harassment claims, she should be prepared for Thomas to "spread a damaging and false rumor" about her.
She said that Mills also told her early last year that Knicks players were not cooperating with her, at Thomas's direction. She said that led directly to a promotional campaign using cardboard cutouts of the players.
Twice last year, she said she met with a human-resources consultant hired by the Garden, who she claimed told her that Mills had asked him to set up a program for Thomas "because he had problems with women."
This past November, after Browne Sanders retained a legal team, the Garden initiated an investigation but refused to let her work for three weeks. Finally, last Thursday, she was told by the Garden that her claims could not be substantiated and that she was being fired.
The lawsuit alleges that by firing Browne Sanders, "Madison Square Garden flouted the antidiscrimination laws to a degree rarely seen in the contemporary workplace."
She said that a Garden lawyer said that she was dismissed because she could not function effectively in her job and interacted poorly with senior management. She said, however, that her employee evaluations were strong and never cited her for poor performance.
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1/25/2006 1:33 AM
