Posted by islesfan:

So these employees are supposed to be so afraid of a single manager, that they would be improperly influenced but they apparently wouldn't be improperly influenced by the head of the company and company itself.

Especially after seeing Jeff Nix lose his job of 15 years, after he had the temerity to simply testify to what he saw between Anucha and Isiah.

That doesn't even pass the laugh test.

James L. Dolan said in a video deposition shown yesterday at the sexual harassment trial at which he and Isiah Thomas are defendants that he fired Anucha Browne Sanders without consulting corporate counsel, talking to her supervisor or reading the report of an investigation into her claims.

“All decisions at the Garden I make on my own,” said Dolan, the chairman of Madison Square Garden, whose image projected on a large screen inside the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan.

“I specifically did not consult with counsel,” he said, adding that the “overall health of the Garden was at jeopardy.”

Dolan said that the danger Browne Sanders posed when she was said to have coerced employees into “corroborating her complaint” — which he said impeded the Garden’s investigation — outweighed a potential legal opinion about “why we would have Ms. Sanders stay in the job.” At the time, she was the Knicks’ senior vice president for marketing and business operations.

Browne Sanders is suing Thomas, the Knicks’ coach and president of basketball operations, for verbally abusing and sexually harassing her, and the Garden for firing her in retaliation for making her claims.

Dolan said he made his decision to fire her without knowing the status of the Garden’s investigation or reading anything more than newspaper accounts detailing Browne Sanders’s accusations. He said he learned about Browne Sanders’s suspected tampering with the investigation from Rusty McCormack, the Garden’s senior vice president for human resources.

Dolan said he discussed the Browne Sanders case with McCormack on a helicopter flight to Manhattan from Cablevision headquarters on Long Island. Hank Ratner, the Garden’s vice chairman, was with them, he said. Dolan testified that he told McCormack and Ratner, “They needed to let her go.”

But in excerpts from McCormack’s video deposition, which was shown after Dolan’s, McCormack denied that he told Dolan anything about the investigation. He testified that he did not know who told Dolan the conclusion in his memorandum on the in-house investigation that Browne Sanders had to be “separated.”

Kevin Mintzer, a lawyer for Browne Sanders, asked, “Did you have any conversations with James Dolan about separating Ms. Browne Sanders from M.S.G.?”

“No, I did not,” McCormack said.

“And did you have any conversations with Hank Ratner about separating Ms. Browne Sanders from M.S.G.?” Mintzer asked.

“No, I did not,” McCormack said. McCormack said the memorandum was written by Marc Schoenfeld, the Garden’s senior vice president for legal affairs, in anticipation of a lawsuit, and he made a few edits before signing it.

He added that the report was “not necessarily” intended to be read by Dolan or Steve Mills, the president of MSG Sports, who was Browne Sanders’s boss and oversees Thomas.

“And the statements you made concerning Ms. Browne Sanders,” Mintzer said. “Did you intend them to be read by anyone?”

“Not necessarily,” McCormack said.

He also said he never read Browne Sanders’s performance evaluations — which were uniformly excellent — before signing the report.

The report also recommended sensitivity training for Thomas, which, McCormack testified, he did not receive. “When the lawsuit came, that was about as much sensitivity training as he’d ever want,” he said.

The Dolan and McCormack videos highlighted the final day of the case presented by Browne Sanders’s legal team. The defense will begin presenting their case today.

Three witnesses testified on Browne Sanders’s behalf yesterday: Ruth Browne, her oldest sister; Jeff Nix, a former Knicks assistant general manager and scouting director; and John Blasig, her mentor and supervisor at a previous job at I.B.M.

Nix, whose contract with the Knicks ended last month, testified that after the team beat Minnesota in December 2004, he saw Browne Sanders in the hallway outside the locker room pulling away from Thomas’s embrace. She walked away toward Nix, but passed him. “She looked upset,” he testified.

He added that when he caught up to her, she told him: “You won’t believe what he just said. He said, ‘I’m in love with you.’ ” Nix said he advised her to tell Mills. Browne Sanders has testified that she regularly informed Mills of her encounters with Thomas, but that he did nothing to change the situation.

In snippets of his video deposition shown yesterday, Mills said he did not respond to her e-mail message complaining of Thomas’s hugging and trying to kiss her.

Dolan was asked in his deposition about the appropriateness of using “bitch,” a word Browne Sanders said Thomas called her, in a workplace.

“No, it’s not appropriate,” he said. “It is also not appropriate to murder anyone. I don’t think that that has happened either.”

Posted by playa2:

Posted by Nalod:

Judge lynch was right to tell them to settle, its a damm mess and its hurting a lot more people than just Anucha, mills, Dolan and iSiah.

This crap just kills moral in offices and MSG is a freakin mess wasting the time and energy to move forward.

Don't we have a season to prepare for?

Well I think this is gonna cleanb up MSG and that's a good thing.

Nothing like suits getting in trouble and then forced to walk a straight line for the company afterwards.

what do you think is gonna get cleaned up? i say nothing. things will pick right back up where they left off. same old same old.