Some would say that bringing up the past is just another way for those that don’t care for certain personalities to hurt them, while others contend that it’s a way to remind people that if you’re famous enough that a lot of stuff will get swept under the rug. Thanks to the MeToo movement, I won’t bother with the hashtag since it’s ridiculous, Marv Albert’s past has been brought up yet again as well. Whether you want to believe that he should be enjoying a continued and prosperous career or not the fact is that he did plead guilty to his own sex scandal back in the day and he was suspended for a while because of it. There are those that would state that it’s kind of typical to see a celebrity get away with something like this, even when pleading guilty, and still go back to work two years later, but then again some would say that he’s paid his dues and is entitled to go back to doing what he’s good at in order to make a living. It’s a hard decision on which way to go but in truth what’s happened has happened and that’s the way it is.
There’s no denying that Marv Albert has made a huge impact in the NBA and anywhere else he’s been heard. But one thing that has always plagued him since the late 90s has been the sex scandal that he was involved in. He was a big celebrity during the 90s even to those that didn’t watch basketball, as he’d appeared on late night TV shows and even the Simpsons. But Marv managed to get away with one of the biggest scandals of the late 90s and not only that, he didn’t face a single day of jail time since he dropped out of the public eye for 12 months during which he was serving a suspended sentence. You can almost hear the outrage from that time despite how different the 90s were compared to today. People were of course split on how to react to such a thing since there was no way to know just who was in the wrong and how truthful the woman’s claims were that Marv had bitten her a dozen times or more and had forced her into a sexual act. But lo and behold, DNA was a thing back then used to determine just whodunit during a crime.
Marv did attempt to deny, deny, and deny again the accusations made against him, and unfortunately his fiance at the time had to be there to hear every last thing that was said about him. But when the DNA results came in his lying didn’t come to a halt but it did change in tune as the DNA from the bite marks was confirmed to be his and the semen left on the underwear of the woman in question was his as well. That kind of put him against the wall as he did the only thing he could think of to do, deny yet again that he’d done anything wrong. This is where it became a battle of ‘he said, she said’, a battle that Marv would ultimately win since he claimed that the woman asked him to bite her and that the sex was consensual and that they’d had a 10-year relationship that was based solely on sex. When another woman came forth to make the same claims as the first however, stating that Marv had done the same to her years before, his case started to look a little more wobbly thanks to the fact that it made him look guiltier in the eyes of some and the prosecution a little more untenable thanks to the fact that an admission came so late.
The real gear-grinder here however is that while Marv did stay away for 12 months he was welcomed back with open arms after that year-long span and given a job by TNT. Less than 2 years after that NBC hired him back to his old role, which no doubt angered a few people to no end. The one point that sticks in everyone’s craw at this time is that if Marv had been convicted of such a crime in today’s era he wouldn’t have been welcomed back so readily to NBC thanks to the firestorm that would have been heaped upon the network. In the 90s he got lucky that sports was on the rise and TV was still a vastly important aspect of people’s lives. Nowadays people would be calling for him to be tossed in jail as the warden conveniently ‘lost’ the key. As it stands now however Marv has been the voice of the NBA for many years and is still active. What people think of him is kind of irrelevant at this point since they’ve either forgotten and allowed his actions to be swept under the rug, or they were too young or hadn’t been born yet when he was being convicted.
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