*HBO’s “Real Sports” on Tuesday reminded folks of the multiple sexual abuse allegations leveled against former NBA star Kevin Johnson, who is currently the outgoing mayor of Sacramento.
New accusers came forward for the segment, which features several women detailing their allegations against Johnson for the first time in public. Previous accounts had only been available through records of investigations into Johnson’s conduct.
READ RELATED STORY: Kevin Johnson’s Molestation Allegations Kill Re-Election Plans
This renewed attention to his molestation accusations comes as Johnson awaits news on whether he’ll be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. That announcement is scheduled for early April.
Below, Deadspin details the “Real Sports” segment:
The 23-minute segment opened with Mandi Koba recounting being groomed by Johnson for molestation. Koba met Johnson in Phoenix in 1995, when she was 15 years old and fatherless, and he was the star point guard for the local NBA franchise and a pious community leader. HBO showed devastating footage of a 1996 interview between Koba and a Phoenix police detective in which she detailed one of the alleged incidents in which she was sexually abused by Johnson.
Deadspin’s publication of a story on Koba in which she spoke out for the first time and of video of that police interview led ESPN to cancel its scheduled October broadcast of Down in the Valley—a sloppy kiss of a documentary that fawned over Johnson for funneling hundreds of millions of tax dollars to the Sacramento Kings to keep the team from leaving town—and preceded Johnson’s announcement that he would not run for a third term as mayor of his hometown.
HBO’s producers also got Xian Thao and Amanda Thomas, two former students of St. HOPE, Johnson’s charter school in Sacramento, and volunteers for his youth groups, to come forward for the first time to the media. The high school friends told of being groped by their supposed mentor nearly a decade ago as 18 year olds. Thomas said Johnson’s standing in the community kept them from speaking out as teens about the alleged abuse from the local hero.
“We were so terrified of disappointing Mr. Johnson,” Thomas said, “that we were just little lambs.”
Kim Curry-Evans, who resigned from a job working for Johnson in 2009, also blasted Johnson. At the time of her resignation, Curry-Evans cited the mayor’s behavior but made no specific allegations against him. Curry-Evans, whose daughter is an alum of St. HOPE, told Real Sports that she quit after learning of a situation that “fit the pattern of sexual misconduct” of previous allegations against Johnson. That knowledge left her “devastated, shattered into a million bits.”
Watch a clip of Koba’s interview on “Real Sports” below, followed by a history of Kevin Johnson’s sexual abuse allegations from The Sacramento Bee:
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