I don’t know Earl K. Sneed.
I have seen him around, but that is just part of the reporter’s life, you see people in passing and never talk to them or just briefly speak to them. You don’t know them at all.
No one is perfect, we all make mistakes, but all mistakes aren’t equal. Domestic violence is a serious issue, if there is something different we need to know about these cases Sneed was involved he should come forward and let us know. From the messages he is posting on Instagram one could surmise he feels he has been done anything wrong and there is more to the story.
Because just the cases themselves are horrible if you take them at face value via SI.
According to a Dallas police report, Sneed “sat on top of her and slapped her on the face and chest.” At one point he told the woman, “I’m going to f—— kick your ass. Today is gonna be the worst day of your life.” Sneed, according to the report, “fled before the reporting officer arrived.” The woman, according to the report, suffered a fractured right wrist and bruises on her arms and chest in the altercation.
Two months later, Sneed was arrested at the Mavericks facility and charged with assault, a class A misdemeanor. On June 28, 2012, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of family violence assault and interference with emergency request. He was sentenced to a $750 fine, supervised community service, and enrollment in an anger management program. Upon completion of his sentence the charges were dismissed. (Contacted by SI, Sneed declined comment.)
After his plea, Sneed dated a Mavericks colleague, a relationship the two made public in keeping with the team’s fraternization policies. Multiple sources tell SI that in 2014 the couple had a dispute and Sneed turned violent, hitting the woman.
Her face swollen, she went to work but within days reported the incident to her immediate supervisor and to Pittman.
Mark Cuban was aware of all this and said he was trying to help Sneed by not firing him.
“I want to be clear: I’m not putting the blame on anybody else,” Cuban told ESPN. “It came down to my final decision that I made.”
In hindsight, Cuban said, “I would have fired him and still made him go to counseling” after learning details of the first domestic violence incident, expressing regret for not following up with police to discover those details.
“It was bad, but we made a mistake about the whole thing and didn’t pursue what happened with the police after the fact,” Cuban told ESPN. “So we got it mostly from Earl’s perspective, and because we didn’t dig in with the details — and obviously it was a horrible mistake in hindsight — we kind of, I don’t want to say took his word for it, but we didn’t see all the gruesome details until just recently. I didn’t read the police report on that until just [Tuesday], and that was a huge mistake obviously.”
“So when the second time came around … the way I looked at it was — and, again, in hindsight it was a mistake — but I didn’t want to just fire him, because then he would go out there and get hired again and do it somewhere else,” Cuban told ESPN. “That’s what I was truly afraid of and that was the discussion we had internally. It was a choice between just firing him and making sure that we had control of him.
“So I made the decision, it was my decision and again, in hindsight, I would probably do it differently. I made the decision that we would make him go to domestic abuse counseling as a requirement to continued employment, that he was not allowed to be alone without a chaperone in the presence of any other women in the organization or any other women in a business setting at all, and he was not allowed to date anybody [who works for the Mavericks]. From that point on — and the investigators are going to see if we missed anything else — he appeared to abide by all those rules, as far as I knew.
It is possible because of the way Cuban coddled him, that Sneed truly doesn’t think he did anything wrong or he feels the women who accused him are lying.
Whatever the case he posted a series of messages on his Instagram story titled “My Support System”. The messages all speak to his character, what a great guy he is and how the women in his life have been the issues.
Maybe he learned his lesson back in 2014 and when given another chance cleaned up his act or he is a serial abuse who doesn’t think he did anything wrong which makes it likely he will do it again. Whatever the case, posting things like this will be seen as making excuses and victim blaming. No reason to make them public.
Flip the pages to see the messages he posted on IG.