Charles Oakley’s long-running legal fight with Madison Square Garden and executive chairman James Dolan was thrown out again Friday, marking the third dismissal in a case rooted in the former Knicks forward’s high-profile removal from the arena after a confrontation with security in February 2017.
Madison Square Garden said the court rejected Oakley’s claims “in their entirety” and signaled that it now intends to take legal action against Douglas Wigdor, Oakley’s attorney, and what it called “his unscrupulous law firm.” Wigdor, in a statement to The Post, said he was disappointed by the decision and maintained that the dispute should still be heard by a jury.
“For more than nine years, Mr. Oakley’s lawyers have pursued claims they knew were false,” MSG said in its statement. “Those claims have now been dismissed by the Court in their entirety — for a third time. We are pursuing legal action against Douglas Wigdor, and his unscrupulous law firm, to hold them accountable for years of frivolous litigation and their blatant abuse of the judicial system.”
The litigation has taken a winding path through the courts. It was first dismissed in early 2020, revived later that year, dismissed again in 2021 and then reinstated a second time in May 2023.
“We are disappointed with the Court’s rulings,” Wigdor said in his statement to The Post. “We believe there are conflicting accounts and only a jury can decide what exactly happened. We are hopeful that the Second Circuit will agree for a third time and remand the case for an immediate jury trial.”
Oakley, a beloved Knicks enforcer who played 10 seasons in New York and helped define the franchise’s hard-nosed 1990s teams, was arrested and escorted out of Madison Square Garden during a Knicks game on Feb. 8, 2017. Although the charges against him were dropped, he sued later that year, alleging claims that included assault, false imprisonment and defamation. A judge dismissed the case in February 2020, but the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals revived the battery and assault claims that November. When the appeals court brought the case back again in 2023, it wrote that the “question of whether the use of force was reasonable under the circumstances is generally best left for a jury to decide.”
That opening for Oakley closed again with Friday’s ruling. In his opinion and order, Circuit Judge Richard J. Sullivan wrote that “no rational jury could conclude that Oakley reasonably feared himself at risk of wrongful physical contact — let alone that MSG intended to stir such an apprehension.”
“Even though the alleged assault occurred in the middle of Madison Square Garden in front of 19,000 and scores of cameras, Oakley concedes there’s no other witness — besides himself — who says he was pushed to the ground,” Sullivan wrote on the first page of his opinion and order.
Oakley’s public feud with Dolan has loomed over the Knicks since it began. The Post’s Jared Schwartz reported in 2025 that the team was willing to welcome Oakley back as a “celebrated team alumnus” if he dropped the lawsuit. An initial ban instituted by Dolan in 2017 had been lifted. Oakley attended playoff games on the road during the Knicks’ championship run in the spring.
“Ample evidence — including videos from multiple angles and the unanimous testimony of every witness (even, to some extent, Oakley himself) — shows that Oakley had a reasonable opportunity to depart the Garden, that he instead resorted to physical violence, and that he was never pushed to the ground,” Sullivan wrote.
