Let me guess. This is your first time hearing anything about this today. See, I told you. The worse that Anucha Browne Sanders' case gets, the less attention it will get. Coincidence? I don't think so.
Yesterday, in Day 6 of the Zeke trial (seems they took a short recess), Browne Sanders's case took a hit harder than Milton Bradley (the baseball player, not the game maker) who tore his ACLafter being restrained from attacking an umpire. 8 individuals testified to Browne Sanders incompetence as a manager and discredited her accusations and memory of the events.
One of those testifying was Stephon Marbury's paramour, the intern whom Browne Sanders was coerced into "getting into the car" with Marbury. Nope, she says she went on her own:
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.
That hurts. She not only confirmed that her encounter with Marbury was just a run of the mill groupie liaison, but she still works for the organization. Then, the Vice President of Community Relations for the Knicks, Karin Buchholz testified that Browne Sanders basically forced her to participate in this investigation and write memos against her co-workers, which she says interfered with her ability to do her own job. This interference included making Buchholz cancel an NBA player event at a school (if you know this particular player, I'll give you one guess as to how I think he should have spent his time since the event was canceled). According to the SportsBusiness Journal, NBA players have the worst reputations of athletes in any of the major sports. Come on, Anucha, you can't be the VP of marketing getting in the way of NBA players doing charity work!
James Dolan, the outspoken Madison Square Garden Chairman, is scheduled to testify today.
I can't tell you for sure what the jury will do, but I have a pretty good feeling that this case is just about over - in more ways than one.
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