After more than seven months of investigation, the Pistons made the decision this week to “dismissal for violating club policy and the terms of his employment contract” their assistant GM, Rob Murphy.
This followed the complaint of a former employee of the Pistons, DeJanai Raska, who had referred to “inappropriate behavior” of the leader. The latter, who arrived in the franchise in September 2021, spoke in the Detroit Free Press to deliver the details of Rob Murphy’s actions.
DeJanai Raska says the ex-executive notably grabbed her buttocks saying “want to put a baby in her belly”, in front of his four-year-old daughter, and that he also tried to kiss her, each time without her consent. Moreover, he allegedly tried to force her to have sex with her.
“I felt like I had a dangerous secret. I felt like if the wrong person found out I could be fired”she says, claiming to have lived in fear and anxiety for months, before she could no longer hold on. “Silence is not an option. Not for me. It shouldn’t be for just any woman. I have an opportunity to be a voice and I want to take back the power. »
Rob Murphy had thus convinced DeJanai Raska to leave his job as a real estate agent and manager for amateur sportsmen and singers so that she becomes his personal assistant in the summer of 2021.
But the employee explains that she quickly understood that she had been hired, outside the classic recruitment process, for other reasons, and she also lost her job in May 2022. Very far from the tasks usually reserved for the he personal assistant to a GM assistant, Rob Murphy used her mainly as a driver for her 14-year-old son, which however did not fall within the scope of her job. DeJanai Raska ignores him and one day asks to leave a meeting so he can pick up the assistant GM’s son. The latter then insults her by explaining to her that she cannot mention this job as a driver to the other employees.
In the process, he sends an email to human resources to explain that DeJanai Raska has resigned. Which was wrong. And if she finally sued the Pistons, it was because she felt it was not going far enough, despite the various alerts sent to franchise lawyers.
“We came forward before going to court so that the Pistons do the right thing”explains Megan Bonanni, one of his lawyers. “It’s shameful that it took the threat of legal action to get the Pistons to do the right thing, after all these months. The organization thus tolerated, approved and was even complicit in what he did. They just hoped Mrs. Raska would disappear. »
