It was what happened after Maggie Gray’s furious rant that appears to have set James Dolan off.
The Knicks and Rangers owner gave a rare interview with ESPN recently, where he touched on a number of subjects and controversies that have surrounded his tenure. The most recent feud is with WFAN and Gray, who called Dolan — among many other things — “a vile piece of trash” this summer over a new song, “I Should’ve Known,” which seemingly depicted his relationship with disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.
Dolan, as reported by The Post, responded by banning all Knicks and Rangers players and employees from appearing on WFAN shows and refusing to do business with the station’s parent company, Entercom, nationwide.
After Gray’s takedown in August, Dolan said he waited for an apology for what he described as Gray going “way the hell over the line.” Instead, he was asked for MSG talent for an appearance and a charitable donation from MSG. Gray would later apologize on air for the personal nature of the attack, but it clearly was not enough in Dolan’s eyes.
She said on the air and on Twitter Monday that she has reached out for a face-to-face meeting with Dolan because “I believe this would be the most productive way to share our differing points of view.”
Gray may not want to ask to borrow any tools if that meeting does come to fruition.
“Imagine yourself in your neighborhood and your neighbor two doors down, who comes to picnics, all of a sudden does something like Maggie’s rant and totally trashes you to the entire neighborhood,” Dolan told the website. “And then shows up two months later and says, ‘Hey, can I borrow that socket wrench set that you have?’ What would you do with that? … I don’t find it noble to sit there and take an attack like that, but it has to be really over the line.
“If you don’t have a tough skin, you’re never going to survive. But at the same time … you have to feel good about yourself. And if you don’t stand up for yourself, how are you going to do that?”
Dolan has shown his, err, “tough skin” in the past by banning and cursing out one Knicks fan who begged him to sell the team last season and responding to an email from another by blindly accusing him of being an alcoholic.
Gray’s point of emphasis was that Dolan oversaw the Garden during Anucha Browne Sanders’ tenure, which ended with her successfully suing over a hostile work environment created by then-coach and team president Isiah Thomas. Dolan fired her over the accusations and let the case play out publicly in federal court before ultimately settling for $11.5 million. Dolan addressed the Sanders case with ESPN and maintains he was in the right.
“I think we didn’t defend ourselves well, so shame on us. … If I had to do it again, I’d be much more careful about how we defended ourselves,” Dolan said. “I’d be much more involved about it. I’d make sure that the truth came out, and the truth didn’t come out.
“People told me when you’re in these kind of trials that it’s stacked against you, as being the big employer versus, particularly, a minority woman. … The second mistake we made was that, even in defending yourself, you might come to the conclusion that there was no way to win the case, and so settle and get the thing out of the papers. That would’ve been probably a better decision then, too. So both decisions were probably not good, and I’m the guy in charge, so I have to take responsibility for them.”