lebron-james-jeanie-buss
Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images
NBA writer Yaron Weitzman recently published a new book which, according to its description, “lays out the high stakes drama happening inside the Lakers’ organization as they try to juggle the warring priorities between LeBron James and the Buss family.” Apparently, if the Los Angeles Lakers organization had its way, Weitzman never would have published it.
In the book, titled A Hollywood Ending: The Dreams and Drama of the LeBron Lakers, Yaron Weitzman draws from over 250 interviews to reveal and dissect the “Succession-like power struggle between the Buss children, to the rise of LeBron’s landscape-altering talent agency and its attempts to assert its own power within the Lakers’ walls, to the evolution of LeBron’s priorities and political voice.”
On Sunday, Weitzman shared a video on TikTok in which he talks about the threats he received from the Lakers organization and how they apparently tried to intimidate him into not including some information that was shared with him by former team owner and president Jeanie Buss.
“The Lakers threatened to sue me to prevent you from reading this book,” Weitzman began. “So I started working on this book around January 2023. Around that time, when you work on a project like this, you reach out to the principals, so I got in touch with Jeannie Buss and the Lakers. Jeannie and I actually engaged in a few messages. We even met a couple of times. They were off-the-record meetings. Normally, I wouldn’t be revealing that to you, except she was the one that put these meetings in public first.”
Weitzman’s TikTok video then cuts to footage of Jeanie Buss where she says in an interview, “There’s somebody that’s out there writing a book, and he said to me that I have a reputation of running a bare bones organization.”
“To be clear, I didn’t accuse Jeanie or the Lakers of anything,” Weitzman continued as the video cuts back to him. “All I do as a reporter is ask other people questions, do the reporting, give Jeanie and the principals a chance to respond. I am far from the first person to bring up the fact that the Lakers under Jeanie Buss might have not spent as lavishly as other organizations.”
The Lakers sent him a letter threatening a lawsuit
Yaron Weitzman goes on to reveal that the Lakers organization hired a lawyer to threaten him with a lawsuit. This occurred, he said, after he sent the Lakers some information that “they might want to respond to.”
“Instead of getting on the phone with me, they decided to hire a famous defamation lawyer named Marty Singer to handle their dealings with me, and he eventually sent me a very strongly written letter. For example, they said that my reporting was, ‘Full of thinly-veiled misogynistic smears, revealing a chauvinism and negative bias that undermines the reliability of my sources.’
“Singer then punctuated the letter by adding that, ‘I want to be incredibly clear with you. There are many times when individuals threaten to sue with neither the reputation to stand up or scrutiny nor the resources to pursue a strong libel claim. Please have no doubt neither of these issues apply here.'”
He later would double-down on X that the Lakers did threaten to sue him, for anyone who wasn’t clear on that. Then, in another X post, he stated that “the book is not a hit-job in any way.”
@yaronweitzman The Lakers threatened to sue me to prevent you from reading this book #lakers #lebron #booktok #authorsoftiktok ♬ original sound – Yaron Weitzman