The TRUTH of the matter is that ESPN already wanted to fire Pierce, so this just gave them a reason.
If this were JJ Redick, they wouldn’t have batted an eye.
Here was the inside scoop on why they fired Pierce back in the day for going on IG Live with his stripper friends.
In April, Pierce was playing poker at a friend’s house in Los Angeles. There was drinking. And smoking. And strippers. And after a little too much drinking and smoking, Pierce decided to start an Instagram Live and, well, show off the strippers. He went on for a few minutes, riffing, he thought, for a couple hundred people. When he finished, he deleted it. He didn’t know IG Lives can be recorded (they can) and reposted (it was). Pierce went home that night thinking no one noticed. He woke up the next day and discovered everyone had.
“I was done with ESPN, anyway,” says Pierce between pulls of lemon mint. “It wasn’t a great fit. There’s a lot of stuff over there that you can’t say. And you have to talk about LeBron all the time.”
. “Come on, I didn’t do anything illegal,” says Pierce. “These motherf—–s in the Hall of Fame, some did [cocaine], f—ing battery. What the f— did I do? I was just having a good time. All the people coming after me, half you motherf—–s do the same s—. You’re just hiding it. And you all are married while you’re doing it. I’m divorced. I’m retired. I’m having fun.” And if Hall voters had held it against him? “Listen,” says Pierce, “if I didn’t make it with this class, it would be the biggest stiff job in Hall of Fame history.”
Pierce was on the I AM ATHLETE podcast, where he talked about getting a call from upper management about the investigation. Pierce said what he did was self-explanatory, so there was no need for an investigation, but he was fired because of ESPN/Disney’s moral clause. The irony is that many immoral things are going on at ESPN.
“I got fired for having some entertainment… It’s girls dancing and we blowing some tree, what did I do wrong?”
Paul Pierce on being let go by ESPN 😭
(via: @IAMATHLETEpod)
— Complex Sports (@ComplexSports) April 10, 2023
Flip the page for the stripper videos if you haven’t seen them. They are pretty wild, but it looks like they were having fun.
