As the New York Knicks aim to close out the Eastern Conference semifinals against the Boston Celtics Wednesday in Game 5, the team is making waves in court as well as on it.
And it is against a familiar foe: retired New York Knicks star Charles Oakley.
The eight-year legal battle between Oakley and Madison Square Garden Network over Oakley’s forced removal from his seat at a Knicks game in 2017 has no end in sight, as the parties’ newest beef is over lost emails, misplaced cell phones and a missing three-ring binder taken by MSG CEO James Dolan to his interview on the Michael Kay radio show two days after the Oakley incident.
Last Friday, Damien Marshall and other King & Spalding attorneys on behalf of MSG filed a memorandum of law in opposition to Oakley’s motion for what are known as spoliation sanctions, meaning a punishment for failure to preserve relevant evidence. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and case law place a duty on parties to undertake reasonable efforts to preserve materials during litigation or in anticipation of litigation. That is true for emails, texts, notes and other materials—including binders—that are sometimes lost, deleted and stored in boxes or on machines that are no longer used or accessible.
The basic logic is that a court needs to know whether evidence exists to support or refute a plaintiff’s claims, and a fair and transparent legal process necessitates evidence be preserved. When parties fail to meet this duty, they face sanctions that can include fines or even dismissal of a case.
Both sides in Oakley v. MSG have accused the other of failing to preserve evidence. MSG previously blasted Oakley for not retaining years of text messages. The company argues that the “destruction” of Oakley’s texts “was based on his conscious decision to trade in his phone” and thus lose data potentially relevant to the case.
Through Valdi Licul and other attorneys from Wigdor and Petrillo Klein & Boxer, Oakley contends MSG has “conveniently lost a lot of information about this case.” The 61-year-old former NBA All-Star cites missing corporate cellphones and email boxes of both Dolan’s “personal bodyguard,” whom Oakley says “confronted, assaulted and battered” him, and a security supervisor who Oakley says was “fired” because of the ejection.
Oakley questions testimony by MSG employees that “say something to the effect that they cannot recall sending or receiving messages” about what was said to, or about, Oakley at the Knicks-Clippers game on Feb. 8, 2017. Oakley contends that MSG “laboriously collected and saved witness statements” that accused him “of using foul language” before he was escorted out—Oakley contends through assault—so it stands to reason other witness statements might have touched on related issues to the removal.
MSG discounts Oakley’s arguments. The company asserts it preserved emails using Microsoft’s compliance software, Microsoft Purview, and sent legal notices to individuals who “may have had information relevant to Oakley’s criminal charges [from the seat incident] and this case.”
But “through no fault” of its own, MSG says, a “technical glitch” in the company’s Microsoft system “caused certain employees’ email files (which had been preserved) to be lost, likely in 2020 or 2021.”
MSG also maintains that Oakley is on a fishing expedition to support what it portrays as a baseless theory: MSG “somehow plotted to hide every shred of evidence substantiating the alleged assault and battery, and convinced every witness—including former employees, unrelated third parties, and NYPD officers—to lie about that hidden evidence, for almost eight years.”
Oakley also wants to know what happened to a binder with handwritten notes Dolan took with him to the Michael Kay show. The interview covered the Oakley incident, along with topics and rumors regarding then-Knicks president Phil Jackson and star Carmelo Anthony. “During the interview,” Oakley’s motion charges, “Dolan can be seen reading from the handwritten notes perched on top of his binder.” Oakley argues that “neither MSG nor Dolan made any effort to preserve these materials.”
MSG counters that “there was no loss of evidence related to that binder,” because the materials in it were provided through other types of pretrial discovery. As to Dolan’s handwritten notes, MSG argues that “Oakley never even asked Dolan about any such notes at his deposition.” MSG also insists that “Oakley does not even offer a theory of why any such notes could be relevant to whether MSG used excessive force in removing Oakley two days prior, especially because there is no other evidence in the record corroborating Oakley’s narrative.”
U.S. Circuit Judge Richard J. Sullivan, who was a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York when the case was filed in 2017 and who was later elevated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, has presided over Oakley v. MSG since it started. He’ll take the arguments under advisement and likely issue a ruling in the weeks ahead.