It was announced this week that Cynthia Marshall will be taking over as the interim CEO of Mark Cuban’s NBA team, the Dallas Mavericks.
Marshall formerly served as the chief diversity officer and vice president of human resources at AT&T, and she has twice been named by Black Enterprise magazine as one of the 50 most powerful women in corporate America,
The decision to hire her comes in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment and violence rock the franchise – triggered by an article published by Sports Illustrated. The allegations do not point to Cuban directly. He has commissioned an independent investigation into the allegations and stated that he had no idea what was going on.
He told SI:
“It’s wrong. It’s abhorrent. It’s not a situation we condone. I mean, I literally, I can’t tell you how many times particularly since all [#metoo] stuff has been coming out recently I asked our HR director ‘Do we have a problem? Do we have any issues I have to be aware of?’ And the answer was no. I asked him again today. Have we done exit interviews like you refer to? Has anybody said anything? Are there any indications that maybe there was something out there and we didn’t pay enough attention to it? No, no, no, no, no, every time.”
Marshall is optimistic about the task at hand.
“I really want to see us as a model of how to respond to this,” said Marshall, to press. “This is going on all around the country. I want us to be a model.”
