NEW YORK (AP) — Charles Oakley's attorney rewrote portions of the manuscript of the former Knicks star’s book to “tell a fundamentally different story from the truth” about the night he was arrested after an altercation at Madison Square Garden, the organization contended in a court filing Monday.
The filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York was the latest step in the dispute between the player and the organization that began Feb. 9, 2017, when Oakley began scuffling with arena security not far from Madison Square Garden executive chairman James Dolan and was eventually led out in handcuffs.
Oakley had a poor relationship with Dolan after his criticisms of the team, and has brought assault and battery claims against the Knicks owner in a case that continues after twice being thrown out.
The filing Monday contains passages from “The Last Enforcer” in which Oakley's thoughts had been crossed out and changed by attorney Douglas Wigdor before being sent back to the publisher.
In one sentence about the altercation, Oakley said he asked security why he had to leave the game against the Clippers and was told, “You have to leave because someone ordered you to leave.” The word “someone” was crossed out and replaced by “Dolan.”
In another sentence where Oakley said he “slipped,” that word was changed to “was eventually pushed down by Dolan's guys.”
“These were not minor edits at the margins," MSG said in its filing. "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.”
MSG said in the filing that Oakley and ghostwriter Frank Isola testified the manuscript was drafted based on “verbatim notes of frequent phone interviews with Oakley to be as accurate as possible, and which Oakley then reviewed for accuracy.”
But Wigdor wrote in an email that the edited version of the book, released in 2022, was 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,” Wigdor said. “We are also confident that a jury will ultimately conclude that it was Dolan who has repeatedly tried to justify MSG’s unlawful activity by inventing a false narrative to defend the use of unreasonable force to remove Oakley from the Garden.”
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Brian Mahoney, The Associated Press
