Politics
Former Knicks Star Clashes With Dolan Lawyer Over Assault at Garden
Charles Oakley answered questions in a federal courtroom on why he didn’t preserve old text messages that might have shed light on the case.
During his decade-long run as a star for the New York Knicks, Charles Oakley was known as a bruising player who embodied a hardnose style of basketball that endeared him to the fans at Madison Square Garden.
That familiar grit seemed to surface at times on Thursday in a federal courtroom in Manhattan as Mr. Oakley addressed questions about whether he had intentionally trashed text messages describing his ouster in 2017 from the Garden by security guards.
Mr. Oakley, who retired from the N.B.A. in 2004, filed a suit againstcompanies that own the Knicks and the Garden after the incident, saying he was assaulted during his removal and asking for unspecified damages.
When the ouster occurred, Mr. Oakley professed to be perplexed, saying that he had merely been enjoying the game like thousands of fellow fans.
The Knicks said Mr. Oakley had behaved abusively. James Dolan, the mercurial and sometimes combative head of the entities that own the Knicks and the Garden, said on an ESPN radio show that Mr. Oakley was “physically and verbally abusive” and added that “he may have a problem with alcohol.”
Mr. Oakley’s lawsuit called those statements “outrageous and patently false.”
Defense attorneys have written to Judge Richard J. Sullivan of Federal District Court in Manhattan accusing Mr. Oakley of having “destroyed all of his text messages” before February 2022.
