Knick President and coach Isiah Thomas can be a charmer with a crowd, but a former team executive suing him for alleged sexual harassment told jurors yesterday he’s a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
“He was always starting sentences with the word ‘bitch,’ ” statuesque ex-marketing veep Anucha Browne Sanders testified in Manhattan federal court.
“Bitch, I don’t give a f- – – about the sponsors. Bitch, I don’t give a f- – – about ticket sales. That’s your job,” Sanders quoted Thomas as telling her whenever she tried to involve players in promotional events for the failing team.
Sanders managed to maintain her cool in the courtroom, even as the seemingly unfazed Thomas bizarrely laughed while she talked.
Sanders, a senior vice president for the team from 2000 to 2006, acknowledged that in public, Thomas is “very pleasant and personable. He was the Isiah that we see.”
But behind the scenes, the hotheaded coach, who joined the team in 2003, flew into frequent rages, dropping f-bombs and targeting venom toward her, the team’s only female vice president, she said.
He also allegedly took aim at whites.
Sanders said that when she asked Thomas at one point to hand-sign letters to season-ticket holders, he spat, “I don’t give a f- – – about these white people.”
She said that prompted her to remind the coach that 80 percent of the team’s season-ticket holders are white.
A 6-foot-1, former college basketball star, Sanders stayed composed as she recounted the alleged verbal abuse and her repeated complaints to her bosses.
But she finally cracked when she said Thomas suddenly flipped his approach – professing his love and suggesting they go “off-site.”
Thomas first pulled her aside at a Christmas party in 2004, and the two had joined in a basketball game called “horse,” Sanders said.
That’s when Thomas told her, “I figured out why we have problems. It’s because we’re so much alike. I’m in love with you. It’s like the movie, ‘Love and Basketball,’ ” Sanders said.
“I said, ‘You’re out of your mind,’ ” Sanders said. “I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could. I was just nervous.”
Sometime later, Thomas called Sanders to a meeting in his office, purportedly to discuss staffing issues, closed the door and gave her a “big hug,” she said.
“He said, ‘You know I’m in love with you,’ ” Sanders recalled. “I said, ‘Isiah, we just need to figure out a way to work together. Where else do you have an African-American president of the Garden, an African-American president of the team and an African-American vice president?’
“It is a tremendous message to minorities that this even exists,” a teary-eyed Sanders recalled saying, clearing her throat as she struggled to repeat his response.
“I want to take you off-site for some private time,” she said Thomas told her.
In opening statements yesterday, Thomas’ lawyer Kathleen Bogas denied that the Knick honcho had ever acted inappropriately toward Sanders, either verbally or sexually. She called him “nothing other than a total gentleman.”
Bogas said Sanders didn’t like the changes that Thomas made when he took over the team and “decided to lash out . . . played the sexual-harassment card.”