Four days ago, a woman walked into the New York Police Department’s 10th Precinct in the Chelsea section of Manhattan and told officers that Kristaps Porzingis had raped her in February 2018, while he was a member of the New York Knicks. A representative for Porzingis, whom the Knicks traded to the Dallas Mavericks on January 31 in a blockbuster deal, has vehemently denied the account, saying that the woman hopes to extort tens of thousands of dollars from the All-Star forward by levying false accusations.
That’s what we know for sure. There’s an account, and there’s a denial, and as of publishing time, Porzingis has not been charged with a crime. Everything else is tougher to parse.
The Details
Tina Moore of The New York Post first reported on Saturday night that the woman told police that at around 2 a.m. ET on February 7, 2018, Porzingis visited her at her apartment in the midtown building where they both lived and invited her back to his place. (According to ESPN, the woman later “told the Knicks that she went to Porzingis’ apartment to get his autograph.”) Once there, she told police, the 7-foot-3, 240-pound forward held her down and raped her.
The New York Daily News on Saturday cited a source who said the woman “reported Porzingis held her down on a bed [and] punched her several times in the face.” A follow-up report by TMZ struck a similar note, citing law enforcement sources who said that the woman, who is reportedly 29 years old and black, told police officers that Porzingis had “hit her in the face several times, spit on her, called her ‘my bitch’ and ‘my slave,’ and said he owned her.”
The incident is said to have taken place mere hours after Porzingis had torn the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee during a game against the Milwaukee Bucks, an injury that has kept him out of NBA action for more than a year. According to a documentary about his ongoing rehabilitation from the ACL tear, Porzingis joined his two brothers and physiotherapist in drinking tequila shots after returning home from receiving his diagnosis that night.
“We made four shots—[physiotherapist Manolo Valdivieso], me, [brother] Martins [Porzingis], and Kris,” Janis Porzingis, Kristaps’s brother and agent, said in the documentary. “And I just said, ‘To new beginnings.’ And we just drink the shot, and started the next day as a new beginning. That’s what we did.”
In a statement to ESPN, Roland G. Riopelle, Porzingis’s lawyer, said on Saturday that they “unequivocally deny the allegations.”
”We made a formal referral to federal law enforcement on Dec. 20, 2018, based on the accuser’s extortionate demands,” Riopelle said. “We also alerted the National Basketball Association months ago, and they are aware of the ongoing investigation of the accuser by federal law enforcement. We cannot comment further on an ongoing federal investigation.” (An NBA spokesman confirmed to multiple outlets only that the league is “aware of the situation.”)
In an interview with the Daily News, however, Riopelle acknowledged sexual contact between Porzingis and the woman, though he insisted that “all sex was consensual.”
”I think there’s going to be no doubt about that when all the facts come out,” Riopelle said. “Before we went to law enforcement, we did a very extensive investigation of this allegation. This woman was trying to extort money from Kris. She spent months trying to get money out of the guy.”
According to multiple reports, the woman told police that she had waited nearly 14 months to come forward because Porzingis had pledged to purchase her silence by giving her $68,000 to put toward her brother’s college tuition. Porzingis “then reneged” on that agreement, police sources told the Post.
The Post cited “one high-ranking NYPD source” who said that investigators in the case “consider [the woman] credible” and “believable.”
The Responses
Monday morning, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported that in October, eight months after the incident, the woman reached out to the Knicks’ legal department in hopes that the team would discreetly mediate her attempts to get Porzingis to pay her the money she says he promised her.
Citing “a series of text messages between the woman and Porzingis, as well as emails between her and the Knicks,” Wojnarowski wrote that the woman continued to pursue “a romantic relationship” with Porzingis following the incident, and told the Knicks that she and Porzingis had signed an agreement confirming his intent to pay her $68,000. Riopelle told ESPN that Porzingis denies signing any such contract, and that he believes the document—a handwritten letter throughout which “Porzingis’s name is misspelled”—is a forgery. After a brief correspondence, the Knicks reportedly broke off talks with the woman in early November, informing her that Porzingis had “decided to retain counsel to represent him” and that the team would “not have any further involvement on Kristaps’ behalf.”
The Knicks offered a similar response this weekend. Asked by multiple outlets whether the team was aware of the rape allegation against its former star player, a team spokesman offered only a boilerplate statement: “This is Kristaps’ personal matter and not related to the Knicks.”
The Mavericks, the team that traded for Porzingis in late January, likewise demurred. “We have been instructed by federal authorities not to comment,” Mavericks owner Mark Cuban told The New York Post via email.
The NBA players’ union offered staunch support for Porzingis. “We have been aware of these allegations for some time, have evaluated the accuser’s claims and, based on what is presently before us, stand with Kristaps,” Michele Roberts, executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, said in a statement issued Sunday.
What the Knicks and Mavs Knew
While the potential legal ramifications clearly take precedence here, there’s also a murky NBA-specific matter at play—how much was known about the nature of the rape and extortion investigations involving Porzingis at the time when New York and Dallas made their deal.
Wojnarowski’s Monday report indicates that the Knicks knew what was going on months before finalizing a trade on January 31 to send Porzingis to the Mavericks. On Saturday night, Wojnarowski reported that the Knicks had “informed the Mavericks of the pending rape allegation against” Porzingis during their February trade call with the league confirming the deal.
The details of that disclosure sound a little different coming from Dallas, though. Two league sources told Brad Townsend of The Dallas Morning News that the discussion during that trade call focused on the alleged extortion attempt, with the Knicks telling the Mavericks they “were convinced that Porzingis was telling the truth.” Said one of Townsend’s sources: “The word ‘rape’ was never used. Only ‘extortion.’”
If the Knicks really did try to elide a credible account of rape in an effort to steer a deal across the finish line, that would be staggering. So, too, would the possibility that the Mavericks took the Knicks’ evaluation of the matter at face value and proceeded with the transaction without doing further due diligence on the nature of Porzingis’s entanglement—especially with a harrowing organization-wide sexual harassment scandal barely in the rearview mirror in Dallas.
Porzingis did not travel with the Mavericks to Oklahoma City for their road win against the Thunder on Sunday, which Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle told reporters had been planned before Saturday’s reports. Carlisle suggested that the Mavericks would be open to allowing Porzingis to take a leave of absence over the final weeks of the season if need be.
“If he wanted to take some personal time away from being on the bench or whatever, we would certainly grant him that, but that would be his call,” Carlisle said. “That would be his call.”
