Anucha Browne Sanders’ lawsuit claiming she was sexually harassed and unfairly fired by New York Knicks president Isiah Thomas was enough to bring tears to the eyes of the former Detroit Pistons bad boy, death threats to the 43-year-old accuser and old reports of a 1985 paternity suit from a woman outside of his marriage.
The New York Post quotes Thomas’ 17-year-old son Joshua Thomas as saying his father sat alone in his private study and cried after his lawsuit became public. He said his father “felt used, like a pawn.”
Joshua said that his mother, Lynn Thomas, “laughed off” the woman’s accusations and reassured the kids that their father was not the man Browne Sanders made him out to be in her lawsuit.
“She told us, ‘Your father is a good man. We’ve been married for 20 years, and no one knows him like I do. I know when he’s telling the truth and I know when he’s lying,’” Joshua told the Post.
Joshua says the family has “no ill feelings” toward Browne Sanders, a former college basketball player and mother of three whom the family knew, but had little contact with, he says.
“(Isiah) never said anything about Anucha,” Joshua said. “Anucha was never a topic of discussion. They did not interact on a daily basis. She was in marketing, and he dealt with basketball.”
Meanwhile, friends of Browne Sanders tell the Post she is “receiving threats” and is “concerned for her children’s safety.” Fred Thompson, Browne Sanders’ former track coach, said the woman is “going through a bad way big-time” since filing her lawsuit last week.
With Isiah’s name in the news as an accused sexual harasser, the Post dug up an old paternity case from a Bloomfield Hills, Mich. woman who claimed her son, now 19, was fathered by the then Detroit Piston.
Jenni Dones claimed in her December 1985 paternity suit that after an “intimate, exclusive, ongoing relationship,” she and Isiah conceived a love child on May 26, 1985. Marc E.T. Dones was born the following February.
Their hookup reportedly took place two months before Isiah’s July 1985 wedding to Kendall, his college sweetheart.
According to a Michigan Court of Appeals document, Dones and Thomas came to a settlement in 1987 in which Thomas agreed to pay about $52,000 and provide $2,764.78 a month until Marc Dones reached 18, when Marc would get a lump-sum payment of $100,000.