Ex-ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips is an admitted “sex addict” who headed off yesterday to have his head shrunk — as his young lover hit the unemployment line.
Phillips, 46, “really needs help, and this was the best way to do it,” said his agent, Steve Lefkowitz, in describing his decision to attend a high-priced facility — in a mystery location — that specializes in sex-addiction treatment.
“It was a bid to keep his life. He’s going in for an illness,” Lefkowitz said. “The problem is, he fell off the wagon.”
Meanwhile, the sports network canned Phillips’ former lover Brooke Hundley, whom police suspect of using ESPN computers to create phony online accounts to contact Phillips’ son and pump him for dirt on the family.
It isn’t his first trip to sex rehab. Phillips, while serving as the Met GM, took a brief leave back in 1998 to get counseling after admitting he had multiple extramarital affairs. His wife, Marni, last month sued for divorce after learning of his trysts with Hundley, 22.
“He knows he needs help, and he wants to work it out,” Lefkowitz said, adding that Phillips decided to enter rehab last week, and that it was not part of an effort to save his job. “He wants to keep his four boys and his wife. He doesn’t want to lose them.”
ESPN fired Phillips Sunday night.
The move came just four days after The Post exclusively revealed that he had a brief affair last summer with Hundley, a production assistant who allegedly developed a “Fatal Attraction”-like fixation on his family after he ended their dalliance.
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Lefkowitz said Hundley’s actions scared Phillips’ kids so much that they are “a mess.”
Hundley left Marni Phillips a taunting letter that included details about the couple’s children and hired a Connecticut waitress to phone Marni to tell her about Phillips’ philandering, police reports say. New Jersey lawyer Rosemarie Arnold, who is not involved in the situation, said that unless ESPN paid Hundley “a pretty penny” to accept being fired, she “has a very good case” against the network and Phillips.
“I think she absolutely was the victim of sexual harassment,” said Arnold. “I think it’s shameful how she’s been portrayed.”
Arnold pointed to a restraining-order request Hundley filed against Phillips on Aug. 20 that claimed he pressured her for sex. The lawyer also noted that when Hundley complained to a superior, she was allegedly told to “get used to it.”
“To me, that says . . . ‘We know what happens here. We’re not going to do anything about it,’ ” Arnold said.