The saga between former New York Knicks star Charles Oakley and Madison Square Garden has taken yet another turn. In a new court filing, MSG lawyers accuse Oakley’s attorney of rewriting part of his new book to obscure the “truth” about his altercation with Madison Square Garden security, according to the Associated Press.
In his new book, “The Last Enforcer,” Oakley recounts the night of Feb. 9, 2017 when he was arrested and escorted out of Madison Square Garden in handcuffs. Oakley got into an altercation with Madison Square Garden security near MSG owner James Dolan.
Oakley and Dolan had been feuding after the former Knick publicly criticized the team, and the changes to Oakley’s book suggest Dolan was responsible for Oakley being thrown out that night.
The filing accuses Oakley’s attorney, Douglas Wigdor, of rewriting the manuscript to target Dolan specifically. In one excerpt listed in the filing, Oakley said security told him, “You have to leave because someone told you to leave.” The word “someone” had been replaced by “Dolan” in the rewritten passage.
Another excerpt originally said that Oakley “slipped” when being escorted out of the arena. The rewritten portion suggested he was “pushed down by Dolan’s guys.”
“These were not minor edits at the margins,” MSG wrote in the filing, per the AP. “Wigdor edited the final version to tell a fundamentally different story from the truth reflected in each and every one of the earlier drafts of Oakley’s autobiography – a truth that would have been fatal to Oakley’s litigation position.”
In a statement of his own, Wigdor said his changes are still “consistent” with Oakley’s account of events from that night.
“The final version of the book is consistent with Oakley’s testimony as well as the evidence and we are confident that a jury will agree,” Wigdor said. “We are also confident that a jury will ultimately conclude that it was Dolan who has repeatedly tried to justify MSG’s unlawful activity by inventing a false narrative to defend the use of unreasonable force to remove Oakley from the Garden.”
