Thursday, May 1, 2014

Dershowitz: Sterling's 'Very Bad' Comments Raise Privacy Issues --You THINK?

Professor Alan Dershowitz 
By Todd Beamon, Apr. 30, 2014, Newsmax.com

Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz condemned Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling's "very bad" racist comments, but told Newsmax that his greater concern was that "I don't think we want the thought police to be intruding on people's private conversations."

"We need to preserve privacy," Dershowitz said in an exclusive interview on Wednesday. "We need to be able to preserve a person's ability to share his thoughts, even if we don't agree with his thoughts, with private people."

Sterling, 80, was banned from the National Basketball Association on Tuesday for making racist remarks. He was banned for life and fined $2.5 million by Commissioner Adam Silver. Silver also asked the governing board of fellow owners to act immediately to force Sterling to sell the Clippers, which he bought 33 years ago.

Sterling is the longest-tenured owner of any of the 30 NBA teams. He vowed to Fox News on Wednesday that he was not selling his team.

The controversy began over the weekend when the celebrity website TMZ.com released an audio recording with a voice said to be Sterling's criticizing a friend for associating with "black people."

An investigation into the recording concluded the voice was Sterling's, Silver said at his Tuesday news conference.

The TMZ.com recording included part of an argument between Sterling, who is married, and his mistress — a model later identified as Vivian Stiviano — about photographs posted to Instagram. The conversation was private and was recorded by Stiviano without Sterling's knowledge.

"Whenever intrusions on privacy bring about media stories like this, the focus tends to be on the content and not on the process — how it came about," Dershowitz told Newsmax.

"It's very important to focus on the process."

He said that he was not "defending the content of the statements. They're very bad. I'm talking about how we came to know them. How the media came to know them."

The professor said that the Sterling comments raised several privacy issues. They include writing private thoughts in a diary that was later made public — and disparaging statements that were made publicly.

Read the full story: www.newsmax.com

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