Kareem Abdul-Jabbar fully supports Adam Silver’s lifetime ban of Clippers owner Donald Sterling for making racist comments to his girlfriend, but he says he also wants whoever is responsible for taping the comments “sent to prison.”
Writing in a strongly worded editorial piece for Time magazine, Abdul-Jabbar spoke out against the methods used to obtain evidence.
“Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media?” Abdul-Jabbar wrote in Time. “Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way?”
As the Daily News’ legal analyst, New York lawyer Tom Harvey, has pointed out this week, the recording released by TMZ last weekend in which Sterling answers questions by his girlfriend in blatantly racist terms, was probably illegally recorded, especially if the tape was made in California, a state in which both parties must know they are being recorded.
Abdul-Jabbar takes a hard stand on the issue.
Citing a series of lawsuits against Sterling charging discrimination as the real proof of Sterling’s racist views, Abdul-Jabbar decries the fact that Sterling was recorded, ostensibly without his knowledge.
“And now,” writes Abdul-Jabbar in Time, “the poor guy’s girlfriend (undoubtedly ex-girlfriend by now) is on tape cajoling him into revealing his racism. Man, what a winding road she led him down to get all of that out.
“She was like a sexy nanny playing ‘pin the fried chicken on the Sambo.’ She blindfolded him and spun him around until he was just blathering all sorts of incoherent racist sound bites that had the news media peeing themselves with glee.”
Abdul-Jabbar goes on to say the media “caught big game on a slow news day, so they put his head on a pike, dubbed him Lord of the Flies, and danced around him whooping.”
Adbul-Jabbar says he is doing some “whooping” now, too, in celebration of Sterling’s ouster, but adds that the public should be “outraged that private conversations between people in an intimate relationship are recorded and publicly played. Let’s be outraged that whoever did the betraying will probably get a book deal, a sitcom, trade recipes with Hoda and Kathie Lee, and soon appear on Celebrity Apprentice and Dancing With the Stars.”
Abdul-Jabbar says he hopes Sterling loses his franchise, “and whoever made this tape goes to prison.
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