Mark Cuban: Not Firing Reporter After Domestic Violence a 'Horrible Mistake'

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban took sole responsibility for not firing Mavericks.com reporter Earl K. Sneed following two domestic violence incidents, according to Tim MacMahon of ESPN.com by calling it a "horrible mistake."

"I want to be clear, I'm not putting the blame on anybody else," Cuban said. "It came down to my final decision that I made."

Cuban continued:

"It was bad, but we made a mistake about the whole thing and didn't pursue what happened with the police after the fact. So we got it mostly from Earl's perspective, and because we didn't dig in with the details—and obviously it was a horrible mistake in hindsight—we kind of, I don't want to say took his word for it, but we didn't see all the gruesome details until just recently. I didn't read the police report on that until just [Tuesday], and that was a huge mistake, obviously."

On Tuesday, a report from Jon Wertheim and Jessica Luther of SI.com revealed that Sneed was arrested twice for domestic violence.

SI.com said that in the first incident involving his then-girlfriend, the police report noted that "Sneed 'sat on top of her and slapped her on the face and chest.' At one point, he told the woman, 'I'm going to f--king kick your ass. Today is gonna be the worst day of your life.' Sneed ... 'fled before the reporting officer arrived.' The woman, according to the report, suffered a fractured right wrist and bruises on her arms and chest in the altercation."

Sneed was arrested for that incident at the team's facility in June 2012 and "pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of family violence assault and interference with emergency request."

Sneed also reportedly assaulted a Mavericks coworker he was dating in 2014. Cuban told SI.com Sneed had been fired on Monday when he was called to comment on the story.

Cuban told ESPN that he didn't fire Sneed after either incident out of a fear that the reporter would simply repeat his behavior elsewhere, instead opting to make him undergo counseling:

"It was a choice between just firing him and making sure that we had control of him. So I made the decision, it was my decision and again, in hindsight, I would probably do it differently. I made the decision that we would make him go to domestic abuse counseling as a requirement to continued employment, that he was not allowed to be alone without a chaperone in the presence of any other women in the organization or any other women in a business setting at all, and he was not allowed to date anybody [who works for the Mavericks]. From that point on—and the investigators are going to see if we missed anything else—he appeared to abide by all those rules, as far as I knew."

Cuban added that he did not account for how it would affect the organization's other employees and the precedent it would set in the office by not firing Sneed. 

"What I missed, again, is I didn't realize the impact that it would have on the workplace and on the women that worked here and how it sent a message to them that, if it was OK for Earl to do that, who knows what else is OK in the workplace?" Cuban said. "I missed that completely."

The report on Sneed was one part of SI.com's larger expose on what is portrayed as a toxic Mavericks workplace where sexual harassment ran rampant.

Wertheim and Luther uncovered in their conversations with a number of current and former team employees incidents of  "alleged public fondling by the team president, outright domestic assault by a high-profile member of the Mavs.com staff, unsupportive or even intimidating responses from superiors who heard complaints of inappropriate behavior from their employees, [and] even an employee who openly watched pornography at his desk."