The Mavericks are going through some things.
The team has been accused of being a cesspool of sexual harassment and now an old Mark Cuban sexual assault accusation has come to light.
It is quite a story.
Here are the details via WWeek.com.
In May 2011, a woman contacted the Portland Police Bureau to make an allegation against Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and one of the most visible figures in entertainment and sports.
Her complaint? That Cuban had sexually assaulted her late one night at an Old Town nightclub.
The woman told police she encountered Cuban in late April at the Barrel Room, at 105 NW 3rd Ave., and asked him to pose with her for a photograph. While they smiled for the camera, she claimed, he thrust his hand down the back of her jeans and penetrated her vagina with his finger.
“I really left it in the past,” she says. “I haven’t thought about it for seven years.”
But she’s sticking to her story.
“I filed the report because what he did was wrong,” she adds. “I stand behind that report 1,000 percent.”
The woman told police she arrived at the Barrel Room at about 11:30 pm with her boyfriend and another friend.
around 2 am, the woman said, she and her friend went to pay their tab and encountered Cuban, who was standing by himself.
“It was apparent he was very drunk,” the woman’s friend later told police. “His eyes were half closed, he was unstable on his feet, and he was slurring his words.”
The alleged victim asked Cuban to pose for a picture.
She told police that Cuban initially placed his right hand on her lower back.
“He then moved his hand down until it was on her buttocks,” according to McGuire’s summary of the alleged victim’s statement. “Cuban then pushed his hand down the back of her jeans and inside her underwear where he cupped his hand over her groin area and inserted the tip of his finger into her vagina.”
The woman submitted seven cellphone images to police as evidence. (WW requested copies of the photos with the woman’s face obscured to protect her identity. The bureau withheld the photos, citing the personal privacy exemption of the state public records law.)
In one of his reports, Detective McGuire, a 22-year bureau veteran, described two of the photos as “significant.”
“In both images, Cuban’s right shoulder is lowered and he appears to be stretching to reach his arm down,” McGuire’s report says. “In one of the pictures, his arm can be seen behind [the alleged victim] and it appears Cuban is reaching down toward her buttocks.”
McGuire also noted the alleged victim’s expression: “Her teeth are clenched, eyes wider than the other pictures and brow raised showing a look of surprise and strain.”
The woman’s boyfriend was “intoxicated and incensed when she told him of the incident,” the police report says. “He wanted to go back into the club and confront Cuban.”
Cuban’s attorney has denied the claim and Cuban was never charged. He also passed a lie detector test and a couple of experts said it was physically impossible for him to do what he was accused of.
Here is what he told police about the night in question. Flip the page to check it out, it is quite interesting.