Many sports “autobiographies” aren’t fully written by the athlete in question. Sometimes, that’s with a fully-disclosed ‘with’ or ‘as told to’ with a sportswriter, while sometimes that’s with uncredited ghostwriters. But it’s stranger to see an athlete’s lawyer accused of editing their book to help the athlete in a civil case by “fundamentally changing” their story. And that’s what’s now going on with Charles Oakley.
Back in 2017, Oakley was involved in a situation at Madison Square Garden around a New York Knicks’ game that led to the New York Police Department being called and arresting him on misdemeanor charges of assault and trespass. That also led to massive disputes between Oakley’s side of the story and the Knicks’ side, with their team PR account calling his account “pure fiction” and with team owner (and MSG chairman and CEO) James Dolan implying Oakley was an alcoholic, but the team still parted ways with their security chief after that.
Oakley eventually struck a plea deal that saw him banned from the Garden for six months. But he then launched a civil suit against Dolan and MSG later in 2017. That suit has been tossed twice, but was allowed to proceed by an appeals court last May.
But MSG still is strongly contesting Oakley’s claims. And as David Propper of The New York Post wrote late Monday night, their latest filing includes an argument that Oakley’s attorney Douglas Wigdor made major edits to Oakley’s 2022 autobiography The Last Enforcer (credited as “with Frank Isola”) to “fundamentally” change Oakley’s narrative of the 2017 incident and preserve his civil case. Here’s more on that from Propper:
Oakley, in one passage, admitted to starting the physical confrontation with security and that he “never should have touched” them, but Wigdor rewrote the version to say security began grabbing his client and he needed to defend himself, MSG lawyers wrote.
In another draft account, Oakley said he slipped when he first got up from his seat, but Wigdor changed it to claim the former NBA star was “pushed down by Dolan’s guys,” according to the court docs.
And Oakley also wrote he “was asked to leave,” but was unsure who demanded that, while the new version from Wigdor stated the retired athlete was “ordered to leave” by Dolan, according to the court filing.
“These were not minor edits at the margins,” MSG lawyers insisted. “Wigdor edited the final version to tell a fundamentally different story from the truth reflected in each and every one of the earlier drafts of Oakley’s autobiography – a truth that would have been fatal to Oakley’s litigation position.”
For his part, though, Wigdor told Propper in an email the book is accurate. “The final version of the book is consistent with Oakley’s testimony as well as the evidence and we are confident that a jury will agree.”
There are plenty of thorny issues in there. Books are significantly different from court testimony, but written perspectives in books, articles, or emails do often matter in court. And they also matter in the court of public opinion. Regardless of if these filings pay off for MSG in this specific litigation, their claims here at least raise some questions around public perception of the Oakley incident. (And there’s another media dimension here with Isola’s involvement in the book, given his current work for ESPN, SiriusXM, and YES: it’s not clear what involvement, if any, he had around these alleged changes from Wigdor, but it certainly may be interesting if he speaks out on it.)
It should be noted that pre-publication edits are far from unheard of. Those take place at media companies all the time. And with books, beyond the credited author or authors, there are also often publishing company editors and fact-checkers involved. Also, plaintiffs in many court cases, criminal and civil, consult with their lawyers before giving testimony.
But MSG’s claims on Wigdor’s edits here would indeed seem to produce quite a different story than the supposed initial version. And this was quite a prominent book: it received a lot of attention when it came out, including with the Boardroom interview the top image is from. And the details of Oakley’s perspective on the MSG altercation were a big part of the attention the book drew. So this will be worth watching to see if more comes out.
