The former NBA champion Dennis Rodman is facing a lawsuit for damages from a woman who accused him of slamming a door on her hand and badly injuring her during an incident at his Houston home, after hiring her to be a personal assistant and artist for his family.
A woman who answered a call to a phone number associated with Rodman’s address in the Texas city dismissed plaintiff Taylor A Banks’ allegations as “a money grab”.
“She never worked here,” the woman said of Banks. “She wanted to paint a picture of him.”
Banks filed the demand against Rodman on Thursday in a state courthouse in Houston with the help of attorney Ruth Rivera as well as the law office of Tony Buzbee.
Buzbee in September won an acquittal representing Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, in his legislative impeachment trial. He also represented numerous women who obtained out-of-court settlements in connection with allegations that Deshaun Watson, the NFL quarterback, sexually assaulted and harassed them during massage sessions.
Banks’s lawsuit alleges that Rodman invited her to live at his home as well as work for his family. Banks described a tense work environment, in which “Rodman repeatedly berated” her and woke her up “in the middle of the night, screaming obscenities at her and ranting at her, without provocation, like a madman”.
“Ultimately,” the lawsuit recounted, “Rodman, in an impaired stupor, physically assaulted Banks by slamming her hand in a door.”
The resulting injury caused permanent nerve damage, Banks asserted. She demands more than $1m to cover what she described as lost career opportunities and to replace personal belongings that Rodman took from her, including a drafting table, art supplies, oil paintings and a laptop.
Banks also alleged that she is owed for mental and emotional anguish.
While the retired Rodman made a name for himself primarily through a 14-year NBA career that saw him provide legendary rebounding skills to a total of five championship victories with Isiah Thomas’s Detroit Pistons and Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, he has endured his fair share of controversies on and off the basketball court.
One such controversy saw him pay $200,000 to settle a lawsuit against a sideline videographer whom he kicked in the groin during a game in 1997, which also landed him a playing suspension. Rodman – who has previously publicly recounted struggling with depression, drugs and suicidal thoughts – has also paid to settle multiple lawsuits out of court that accused him of separate instances of sexual assault, among other legal problems.
More recently, he was victimized by a woman who admitted to posing as a financial adviser and stealing millions from him as well as a handful of other professional athletes. He leveraged an unlikely friendship with Kim Jong-un into persuading the North Korean dictator to release an American prisoner early.
And at one point, some pundits considered him a viable instrument for peace as far as deterring the US and North Korea from nuclear war with each other during Donald Trump’s presidency, because he was perhaps the only person globally to be on good terms with both Kim and Trump.
Rodman’s relationship with daughter Trinity – the forward for the US women’s national soccer team – has also received significant media attention. In 2021, after he surprised her at one of her games, Trinity Rodman said she was not particularly close to her father, going “months if not years without his presence or communication”.
“But at the end of the day, he’s human I’m human,” the post added. “He’s my dad, and I’m his little girl and that will never change.”
• This article was amended on 14 April 2024 to add the detail that attorney Ruth Rivera helped with the filing of the demand by Taylor A Banks.
