Donald Sterling is the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers.
And he’s going to stay that way.
Donald Sterling, who was essentially show the door by the NBA after he was recorded making obscene and disgusting racist remarks, lost an appeal that he filed to regain the team after his estranged wife, Shelly Sterling, sold them for an unprecedented $2 billion.
Here are the full details from The Associated Press (via ESPN.com):
The 2nd District Court of Appeal said Shelly Sterling properly removed her husband from a family trust that owned the team and that the sale to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer prevented the trust from an “extraordinary loss.”
Shelly Sterling took control of the family trust after a recording surfaced of Donald Sterling making offensive comments to a young girlfriend about black people and other minorities.
The NBA fined him $2.5 million, banned him from the league for life and threatened to seize and auction the team.
Shelly Sterling was able to take control of the trust after two doctors found her husband of almost six decades had signs of Alzheimer’s disease.
The 81-year-old billionaire sued his wife to block the sale, but a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled against him and approved the sale in July 2014.
No surprises here—especially because, as the AP notes, Sterling basically gave Shelly the verbal thumbs up upon finding out she fetched $2 billion for an NBA team that only recently returned to prominence.
Hopefully this decision, while a formality, puts an official end to the Donald Sterling saga. He still has litigation pending against Shelly, the NBA and the doctors who declared he was showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease, per the report. But even so, those lawsuits, much like this appeal, seem like footnotes. Donald Sterling appears to be grasping at straws here and not much else.
