Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said on Wednesday he is to blame for keeping former Mavs.com reporter Earl K. Sneed on the team's staff even after Sneed was the center of two different domestic violence incidents.
Cuban said this was a "horrible mistake in hindsight."
"I want to be clear, I'm not putting the blame on anybody else," Cuban told ESPN. "It came down to my final decision that I made."
He said, in hindsight,"I would have fired him and still made him go to counseling."
In their report on the Mavericks published on Tuesday, Sports Illustrated cited a 2011 police report that Sneed's then-girlfriend suffered a wrist fracture and bruises on her arms and chest in an altercation with Sneed, which took place during the 2010-11 NBA season. Sneed fled the scene and was arrested two months later.
After Sneed paid a $750 fine and completed supervised community service and an anger management program, the charges were dropped.
SI also said Sneed was the center of another domestic violence incident in 2014 with his then-girlfriend who was also a co-worker. She reported her injuries to Mavericks human resources director Buddy Pittman, who was suspended from his job this week.
"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 said. "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."
He continued:
"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 then he would go out there and get hired again and do it somewhere else. 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. I made the decision that we would make him go to domestic abuse counseling as a requirement to continued employment, that he was not allowed to be alone without a chaperone in the presence of any other women in the organization or any other women in a business setting at all, and he was not allowed to date anybody [who works for the Mavericks]. From that point on -- and the investigators are going to see if we missed anything else - he appeared to abide by all those rules, as far as I knew.
So that was my decision. What I missed, and it was truly a f--- up on my part, because I was not there [at the Mavericks' office], I looked at everything anecdotally. My real f--- up was I didn't recognize the impact it would have on all the other employees. I looked at this as a one-off situation where, OK, if I don't do anything, this person could go out there and do damage on another women another time. Or do I say, can we get him counseling to try to prevent that from happening again? I thought I was doing the right thing at the time.
What I missed, again, is I didn't realize the impact that it would have on the workplace and on the women that worked here and how it sent a message to them that, if it was OK for Earl to do that, who knows what else is OK in the workplace? I missed that completely. I missed it completely."
Cuban was also fined $600,000 by the NBA on Wednesday for saying his team should tank the rest of this season, so not a great look for him the past couple of days.
