Attorneys for Donald Sterling want a judge to allow the former Clippers owner to countersue a woman who alleges she was subjected to sexual demands and racist comments while they were romantically involved and she was in his employ.
Maiko Maya King’s lawsuit, filed in June 2014 in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleges she was fired when she complained.
She says they were involved in a romantic relationship from 2005 to 2011, during which Sterling lobbed a “steady stream of racially and sexually offensive comments” at her.
Sterling’s proposed countersuit alleges that she took a portrait of him and other property without his permission, according to court papers filed Wednesday by the real estate mogul’s attorneys.
King alleges that Sterling made sexual demands and withheld wages when she refused. She also accuses him of uttering racial epithets against her former husband, who is black, and their children.
Her lawsuit quotes Sterling as asking her, “How could you be married to a black man? I want to take you out of the black world and put you into the white world.”
In their court papers, attorneys for Sterling allege that King is “a younger woman attempting to fleece an 81-year-old man.”
The Sterling attorneys also deny in their court papers that King is a former employee of his corporation.
“She was never such and discovery propounded to her will show that,” the Sterling lawyers state in their court papers.
According to the proposed countersuit, Sterling and King were friends from 2005 until last year and that she had access to his home many times. In May 2014, she took the oil painting of Sterling worth $10,000, an envelope containing $10,000 cash and a $7,000 hearing aid without his permission, according to the tentative countersuit.
Sterling’s lawyers claim they asked King in February to return the painting, but she refused. Sterling also lent King $2,000 to pay her mortgage at her home, but she still owes $1,500, according to the proposed countersuit.
Sterling was banned for life by the National Basketball Association over racist remarks in a private conversation that were recorded secretly and leaked to the media last year. His wife, Shelly Sterling, later sold the team to former Microsoft Chairman Steve Ballmer for $2 billion.
A hearing on the Sterling countersuit motion is scheduled Oct. 21 before Judge Suzanne Brugera.
