Are NBA Stars Out of Bounds Off the Court?
July 2, 2004 -- NBA players are the highest paid and among the most talented athletes in the world, but the league is facing an image problem. Too often, the best players on the court are landing in criminal court.
Los Angeles Laker Kobe Bryant spent the playoffs shuttling between the basketball court and a Colorado courtroom, where he is contesting a rape charge. Retired New Jersey Nets star Jayson Williams recently made headlines as he faced manslaughter charges in the shooting death of his limousine driver. He was acquitted of manslaughter, but found guilty of attempting to cover up the shooting death. The jury deadlocked on a reckless manslaughter count; he faces another trial on that charge.
Few Cases Get Wide Media Coverage
But many cases involving NBA players are never widely reported. A sexual assault case against Portland Trailblazer Ruben Patterson — the NBA's first registered sex offender — is just one example.
Patterson's victim was a 23-year-old woman, who agreed to be identified as "Jenny." Jenny says Patterson assaulted her in 2000 when she was working as his children's nanny. She said Patterson followed her down the hall naked one night and grabbed her.
"The more I was resisting, the angrier he was getting," she said. Jenny told police Patterson forced her to perform oral sex.
"When you get into the documents and the transcript … you find out it's a brutal crime," said lawyer and journalist Jeff Benedict, who researched the case for his new book, Out of Bounds: Inside the NBA's Culture of Rape, Violence and Crime.
"He basically palms a girl's head like a basketball and has her perform a sex act on him that anybody who knew about that would say, 'This is outrageous,' " Benedict said.
The Bryant, Williams and Patterson cases are just a few of dozens of criminal cases involving current or former NBA players, according to Benedict. Of the 417 American-born players in the 2002 NBA register, he managed to obtain information on 177.
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