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Los Angeles Lakers owner and president Jeanie Buss recently sat down for a very in-depth interview with Graham Bensinger.
In it, Buss discussed a plethora of topics, from fans still asking her to autograph her Playboy photos to the bizarre living arrangement she has with her husband Jay Mohr.
Another one of those topics had to do with a moment early in her tenure in Lakers ownership when she was groped by a fellow NBA owner.
“What was a situation where an NBA owner grabbed your butt?” Bensinger asked. “What happened there?”
“It’s about the bullying and about the intimidation and so as we were waiting, taking a break from the meeting and everybody’s in line for the buffet for lunch during the lunch break, somebody grabs my a–,” Buss responded.
“And I turn around and I was so shocked… If I didn’t have the confidence that my dad put in me – that was a moment where I wanted to shrink and to be nothing – that I would have gotten sick and said, ‘I gotta go. Do I really belong here? I’m just really not one of the group.’ I’ve been singled out and made me really self-conscious.”
“So what did you end up doing?” Bensinger followed up.
“I just gave him a dirty look, like, ‘back off.’ And I stayed in the room,” she replied.
“And I realized that I might not be able to gain the respect of the existing ownership groups. But everybody that came after me, I could help them in the room, because they’d be new.”
At another point in the interview, Jeanie Buss discussed why she stuck with her now-husband Jay Mohr through his addiction and the erratic behavior that came with it.
“In one week, I think he ran out of gas three times in his car,” Buss revealed. “And it’s like, ‘How is that possible that you run out of gas? What are you paying attention to?’ … Things just weren’t right. I had confronted him and I said, ‘I just don’t believe your lies and so you don’t even need to bother me with them anymore, because I don’t believe them.’
“I tried to date other people and just end the relationship, but I was never going to end the relationship with his son. I’d grown attached to him and I worried about him.”
“His life had become unmanageable and he knew he was gonna die if he didn’t get help,” Buss continued. “It’s a dead-end street; there’s nowhere to go. Addiction will kill you.”
“When you actually can be beaten down to your knees by your addiction, where the only conceivable way out is what you’re being offered – and then you take it,” Jay Mohr explained. “My way led me into an intervention at 50 and going into rehab and standing in line for meds in pajamas at 50 years old. I have empirical data that my way does not work.
“So when you surrender surrender, like absolutely, ‘I’ll do whatever it takes,’ and you do that, and then you build slowly by slowly by slowly, one day at a time, and you learn a design for living: To share that with somebody… It’s like winning the Super Bowl, the NBA Championship and the World Series all wrapped in one, because it’s not a game, it’s your life.”
The reason, Buss says, that she didn’t just move on from Mohr was because she thinks “every person at some point in their life needs help or support.”
“it seems like there [were] a dozen exits that she could have taken for a much easier few years,” Mohr added. “I guess she loved me until I could love myself. Like I get choked up even thinking about it. Like how at my worst she’s seen me and stuck with me.”