Former Knick star Anthony Mason was hit with a harassment violation Christmas night after he slapped around a woman who caught his eye at a club, according to police and his alleged victim.
When Christine Douyon, 23, rejected his best shot, the hulking power forward whacked her across the face, knocking down her pocketbook and sending its contents spilling across the floor of Home on West 27th Street, she and cops said.
Mason, 41, ducked arrest because Douyon wasn’t seriously hurt, police said.
“The whole night, he was, like, poking me as I went by, and he pulled my hair,” said Douyon, who didn’t know who the former All-Star was.
“I didn’t look at him. He then saw me talking to a guy who happens to be my cousin. He pushed him into me, and that’s how the whole thing started,” she said.
“He actually slapped me – and I slapped him back. And then he went to punch me, and that’s when his friends had to hold him back. The police said that unless he hurt my jaw, it wasn’t assault, it was harassment.”
Mason, who helped the Knicks reach the NBA Finals in 1994 and won the league’s Sixth Man award in 1995, spent Christmas night boozing with his buddies at the club – and trying to catch Douyon’s attention, cops said.
“He was hitting on the female all night,” one cop said. “He slapped her twice, her bag hit the floor, and her things came out. She lost her cellphone. She wanted him arrested for stealing the phone.”
Cops grilled the 6-foot-7 Mason about the matter and issued the violation at 2:45 a.m. Wednesday.
He has had run-ins with police before – including an arrest in 2000 for attacking a cop in New Orleans and another after a bar fight in Harlem the same year. The charges in both those cases were dropped, but in 1998, he pleaded guilty to child endangerment after he and a pal had sex with two underage girls in Queens.
Douyon, a resident of Jamaica, Queens, said Mason made “comments about how we didn’t know who he was.”
“His friend said, ‘We could have given you money.’ I said it wasn’t about money.”