Los Angeles Lakers guards Nick Young and Jordan Clarkson have been accused of sexual harassment after an alleged incident Sunday night in which the two basketball players apparently yelled and made vulgar comments to a woman named Alexis Jones and her 68-year-old mother while the two vehicles were stopped at a red light.
Jones—the co-founder and chairwoman of I Am That Girl, a non-profit advocacy group that promises to “lift girls up, have their backs, and make it safe for them to be who they are”—snapped photos of Young and Clarkson in the Jeep in which they were riding along with two other occupants and posted it to Instagram. The Lakers said, via Deadspin, they were investigating the incident.
Jones has since made her Instagram account private, but the Daily Mail captured her original post.
“We just kind of heard loud noises and I just thought it was boys being boys, being loud,” Jones told the Los Angeles Times on Monday. “They were kind of reaching out of the car. So my mom said, ‘Oh my god’ and I looked up and they were making very vulgar sexual explicit motions to my mom. My mom is a 68-year-old grandmother. It just totally shocked me and caught me off-guard. My mom started bawling. It was a really scary, unfortunate situation and I got really angry.”
On Instagram, Jones wrote, “I’m angry. I’m insulted. I’m hurt. They were laughing hysterically until they realized I was filming them and immediately they panicked like the cowards they are.”
After she posted the images on Instagram, at least one of her followers identified Young and Clarkson. The Lakers have since apologized to Jones, though Young told the Times that he denied being involved.
“Aye if you want some attention take a pic of me and say anything next to it and post… The world we live in,” Young wrote on Twitter after the incident before deleting the tweet.
Said Lakers publicist John Black, “We take the allegation seriously and are continuing to look into it. Until we get all the facts from all the parties involved, it’s not appropriate for us to comment.”
Jones told ESPN that she had created a program called “ProtectHer” to address sexual abuse in sports.
Said Jones: “I was on phone calls with the NBA as of Friday talking with them about integrating this message and this program into the NBA.”
Photo via Michael Tipton/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0)
