Subscribe
Follow Us
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban took full responsibility for keeping a former team beat writer employed after fully knowing about his past issues with violence toward women, per a report by Tim MacMahon of ESPN. This comes just a day after an explosive story from Sports Illustrated detailed the corrosive work environment within the Mavs organization.
MacMahon spoke to Cuban after the fallout of the explosive Sports Illustrated story that detailed a corrosive work environment inside the Mavericks organization. He said it was a huge mistake to keep former employee Earl Sneed on staff after learning about two instances of domestic violence.
“It was bad, but we made a mistake about the whole thing and didn't pursue what happened with the police after the fact,” Cuban told ESPN. “So we got it mostly from Earl's perspective, and because we didn't dig in with the details — and obviously it was a horrible mistake in hindsight — we kind of, I don't want to say took his word for it, but we didn't see all the gruesome details until just recently. I didn't read the police report on that until just [Tuesday], and that was a huge mistake obviously.”
MacMahon also reported that Cuban said it was solely his decision to keep Sneed employed. The reason? He thought they could prevent Sneed from abusing another woman somewhere else, and would rather have tried to get him counseling rather than unleash him on other women.
Article Continues Below
“So when the second time came around … the way I looked at it was — and, again, in hindsight it was a mistake — but I didn't want to just fire him, because them he would go out there and get hired again and do it somewhere else,” Cuban told ESPN. “That's what I was truly afraid of and that was the discussion we had internally. It was a choice between just firing him and making sure that we had control of him. So I made the decision, it was my decision and again, in hindsight, I would probably do it differently.”
Cuban said his mistake was not thinking how it would affect other women in the workplace. Sneed has since been fired.
There is no excuse for what Sneed did, and Cuban definitely should have acted sooner and been more diligent after the first incident.
