Hurley, Booster, AD Tangled in Accusations at Arizona State

Things are getting messy at Arizona State.

According to reports, men’s basketball coach Bobby Hurley, in an email sent last December and obtained by Yahoo Sports via records request, Hurley slammed ASU athletic director Ray Anderson. The basketball coach wrote that his boss had “disregarded the safety and shown no sensitivity towards the women that have experienced sexual assault.”

The email reportedly stems from allegations that that a prominent booster named Bart Wear harassed three women married to members of the athletic department, including Hurley’s wife Leslie.

John Canzano, writing for Oregon Live, breaks down the tangled mess:

The harassment allegations against Wear were first reported in March 2019. Six weeks later, Anderson, faced with raising money for his athletic department, was apparently on a golf junket with the accused-creep booster. They used Wear’s private plane. Understandably, that news didn’t go over well with the husbands of the women who made the accusations.

One of those husbands, David Cohen, is a former senior associate AD at Arizona State. Cohen said he lost his job in December for insisting that Anderson investigate the allegations into Wear’s actions. Cohen’s sister, incidentally, is Jennifer Cohen, the AD at Washington and a major power-player in the conference.

The timeline of the events had to have caused distraction during the regular season:

Think about that timeline on the email sent by Hurley to Anderson, and copied to university president Michael Crow.

The people involved have had to function normally, and work alongside each other, for six months. All of these feelings were going on in the background and would have not been known if it weren’t for that records request. Cohen has since sued ASU for $1.5 million. Wear lawyered up, too, and wants $5 million. And in the end, I’m left wondering how much better college athletics would be without the big-dollar boosters given the keys to the kingdom.

It remains to be seen how the case will play out in court, but Hurley was clearly dealing with major distractions this last season.