How The Donald Sterling Tapes Were Made

In the wake of the announcement yesterday by the Commissioner of the NBA that the octogenarian owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, Donald Sterling, would be banned from the NBA for life, there was precious little reflection about how the now notorious tapes of him spewing racist nonsense were originally made. I thought that THIS column by NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Time magazine made some thought provoking points about that little-considered aspect of the story.

"Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way?... The making and release of this tape is so sleazy that just listening to it makes me feel like an accomplice to the crime."

"And now the poor guy’s girlfriend (undoubtedly ex-girlfriend now) is on tape cajoling him into revealing his racism. Man, what a winding road she led him down to get all of that out. She was like a sexy nanny playing 'pin the fried chicken on the Sambo.' She blindfolded him and spun him around until he was just blathering all sorts of incoherent racist sound bites that had the news media peeing themselves with glee."