Former NBA All-Star Stephon Marbury had a sexual relationship with his family’s personal chef, and later agreed to pay her $900,000 to keep quiet about the affair, the New York Post reported on Saturday.
Court papers that recently became public revealed that Marbury hired Thurayyah Mitchell as his family’s chef in January 2006. He fired her later that year, but made an arrangement to pay her $900,000 so that she wouldn’t discuss their affair.
The two reportedly had sex on about five occasions, all of which he says were consensual. Mitchell reportedly said she felt pressured to have sex in order to keep her job.
The timing of Marbury’s sexual affair with Mitchell was around the same time the Knicks were dealing with Isiah Thomas’ sexual harassment suit, so Starbury wanted to keep things quiet in order to avoid the embarrassment and to preserve his family life. He was making around $17 million a season at the time, and agreed to pay the large total to Mitchell. However, he stopped making payments in January 2010 — after paying around $600,000 to her — and she requested to see an arbitrator for a ruling on the remaining amount.
An arbitrator ruled that Marbury needed to pay Mitchell the remaining $300,000. The filing became public on Friday after Mitchell’s lawyers asked a judge to enforce the award.
This story is just quintessential Marbury. Let’s put aside that he had an affair with his personal chef. He was smart enough to realize at the time that he needed to pay her to keep quiet because of the embarrassment the story would have caused. With the kind of money he was making, his payoff was expensive, but reasonable. But leave it to this genius to pay a woman $600,000, and then stop when he’s two-thirds of the way there. I guess by then he realized it wouldn’t do any harm if people found out about the affair. He was already out of the NBA by 2010 and probably had little left to protect, so why continue paying? Still, you pay $600,000 only to have the story come out eventually? How dumb can you be. Hope that extra $300k saved was worth it.
I wonder if Marbury’s current wife Tasha will talk about the story if she does sign on to “Basketball Wives.”
By the way, Marbury threatened in 2007 to blackmail Isiah Thomas. I’m still waiting for him to spill all on that.
