Former NBA forward Dante Cunningham was arrested twice last season, on allegations of domestic abuse.
The Minnesota Timberwolves cut ties with him, but authorities dropped the charges and determined that Cunningham’s accuser lied.
The 27-year old says that, given the increased scrutiny on domestic violence in pro sports, he’s become a pariah in the L. Cunningham says he’s continuing the fight to clear his name.
Per the AP:
He is now an ex-Timberwolves forward, an NBA free agent who is living in a motorhome at a campground near the campus of Penn State, where a former college teammate is on the coaching staff and runs him through workouts. He is staying in the motorhome for reasons of convenience and not monetary. But the journeyman player who was hoping to get a new multi-million dollar contract this summer says he hasn’t even gotten an offer for the league minimum because teams have told them it’s too risky to bring him in.
“At this point it’s about justice and it’s about clearing my name,” the 27-year-old forward said. “Clearly this adds a terrible stigma to my name. … Now when anyone looks up Dante Cunningham, oh, wasn’t he the one that was in trouble? There’s nothing out there saying there was a false charge and now we have to change it. We have to bring justice to this situation so that this doesn’t happen again.”
Cunningham’s agent, Joel Bell, estimates Cunningham could have landed a deal paying him more than $4 million per season were it not for the charge. He said he was told as recently as Monday by one team that it couldn’t risk the public relations trouble that could come from signing him. […] “They think I’m a bad person,” Cunningham said. “C’mon. I’m a great person. Give me that chance. I’ve been stripped of that. You have to understand that. That’s terrible. Awful. And if I don’t have my name, what do I have?”
