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nixluva
Posts: 56258
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Joined: 10/5/2004
Member: #758
USA
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Some more of todays proceedings:
Testimony Contradicts Accusations by Browne Sanders
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Published: September 25, 2007
A former Knicks intern who had sex with Stephon Marbury in his truck outside a Westchester County strip club in 2005 testified in federal court in Manhattan yesterday that she had not been drunk or coerced.
Her story of having had consensual sex with Marbury on her birthday contradicted testimony by Anucha Browne Sanders, the former Knicks executive who is suing Coach Isiah Thomas and Madison Square Garden for sexual harassment.
Kathleen Decker, the former intern, denied Browne Sanders’s testimony that she could not refuse Marbury, who was at the club in Mount Vernon, N.Y., with his cousin Hassan Gonsalves, who was a Knicks employee at the time and a former boyfriend of Decker.
Decker testified that she accepted a ride home from Gonsalves rather than from one of two girlfriends who joined her for her birthday celebration. But, she told the court, Marbury was standing outside the club and asked her, “Are you going to get in the truck?” She said, “So I got in the truck.”
She said that she never felt a loss of control with Marbury.
Decker’s late-night sexual encounter with Marbury came to light when Browne Sanders was gathering information from subordinates that would lead to Gonsalves’s firing in November 2005 for sexual harassment.
A day after Decker told Browne Sanders about an abusive comment that Gonsalves made to her, she said Browne Sanders called her into her office.
“She sat me on the couch,” Decker testified, “and she said: ‘I know there’s more. You can tell me. I’m a mother.’ I was nervous.”
Decker added, “She asked me if I felt forced,” but she told Browne Sanders, then the Knicks’ senior vice president for marketing, that she had not. Browne Sanders testified that Decker had told her she was “stunned” and “very drunk.”
A few days after the meeting, Decker sent Browne Sanders a card thanking her for being “incredibly supportive,” and said she “cannot change the poor decision(s) I’ve made in the past.” Decker testified that she sent the card fearing that “what I did outside the job could affect my work.” She now works for the Garden of Dreams Foundation, a charity run by the Garden.
The Decker incident in late 2005 is part of what lawyers for the Garden and its chairman, James L. Dolan, who is a co-defendant, say are a series of fabrications and distortions that Browne Sanders built into sexual-harassment claims against Thomas and retaliation charges against Dolan. Dolan is scheduled to testify today.
In court yesterday, Decker and seven other witnesses cast doubt on Browne Sanders’s accusations, memory and managerial competence.
But perhaps the most significant damage to Browne Sanders’s case came from Karin Buchholz, the Knicks’ vice president for community relations. Buchholz testified that she resented being ordered to write a memo citing incidents showing that Marbury did not like Browne Sanders.
“I felt like I was being dragged into something I didn’t want to be dragged into,” Buchholz said. “She told me what to say. She said, ‘Karin, go back and write that memo.’ ”
She said that writing the memo might hurt her standing with Marbury, with whom she said she had a good relationship.
Buchholz said Browne Sanders also asked her for help in finding an employment lawyer to help with a possible lawsuit against the Garden, and was pressured by Browne Sanders to join her for a meeting at the law firm.
“I said, ‘I have an event, a school assembly, with Jerome Williams,’ ” she said, referring to a former Knicks forward. “She said, ‘Cancel the event.’ ”
Buchholz said she had no reason to see the lawyer and did not want to be part of any legal action, especially against Thomas, whom she said she liked and admired. “She said, ‘I thought you supported me.’ ”
Buchholz said she now viewed that as a test of loyalty, and she went to the meeting sensing her job might be in peril if she were to refuse. Even as the Garden investigated the harassment claims against Thomas, Buchholz said, Browne Sanders called to ask if she had been interviewed, who had been interviewed and what she was going to say. “I couldn’t believe she was putting me in this position,” she testified, adding that Browne Sanders regularly said that she knew she should not be speaking with Buchholz.
Buchholz’s contact with Browne Sanders gave credence to the Garden’s contention that Browne Sanders was impeding their investigation and had to be fired.
Buchholz also testified about an incident in which Browne Sanders told her to return four weeks into a six-week leave for her partner’s pregnancy. She said that it would be better for her career to return early because Steve Mills, the president of MSG Sports, “has an issue with your lifestyle.”
Mills, at the defense table, looked angry.
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