Former NBA Player Keyon Dooling Discusses Childhood Sexual Abuse in RTT Video

Former NBA player Keyon Dooling appeared on Red Table Talk on Facebook Watch and spoke about being sexually abused as a child.

In one excerpt from the interview, he spoke about the "doubt and insecurity" he felt revealing what had happened to him as a child, since he was in "a very masculine industry." 

"How would the guys perceive that I've been sexually abused at the hands of a teenage man?" Dooling said he contemplated.

Dooling also said he initially blamed himself for being the victim of a sexual assault.

“So the first question was what was it in me that they saw that it happened to me?" he said. "Was it some type of energy that I was giving off? So a lot of times I blamed myself. Like, 'Dang, he caught me slipping.' What was I doing there?"

Dooling, 39, first shared his story in a May 2018 story for The Players' Tribune. Dooling wrote that when he was seven years old, a 14-year-old boy played a pornographic video for him and his friend before forcing them to touch him and perform oral sex on him. 

Dooling wrote that he suppressed that memory before it all came flooding back one day in Sept. 2012, when a man in a restaurant bathroom groped his buttocks. Dooling said he began having problems with his mental health from there. He walked into the Boston Celtics facilities after the 2012 season and quit the team. 

Dooling eventually checked into a psychiatric hospital, though he recounted the support of his wife Natosha and members of the Celtics, including general manager Danny Ainge, former head coach Doc Rivers and his teammates at the time, Rajon Rondo and Avery Bradley. 

"Avery, Rajon, Danny, Doc, my wife... they all gave me the same look," he wrote in The Players' Tribune Piece. "In their eyes, I didn’t see judgement or fear. I only saw kindness and confusion. They just wanted to help me, because they knew that something terrible must have happened to the man they knew."