GoKawiil“This was harassment. This was not OK,” the third former staffer said.
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There's been centuries' worth of theorizing about the effects of surveillance on people's actions. More recently, neuroscientists have demonstrated what happens to the brains of people under the spycam’s gaze. Associate professor Kiley Seymour of the University of Technology Sydney has theorized that it induces a kind of hyper-reactivity, a constant state of fight-or-flight. “Being watched,” Seymour told Scientific American, “drives this hardwired survival mechanism into overdrive.”
Richards used to have an active, vibrant presence online. Today, Richards has functionally erased herself from the internet. Her 44,000-follower Instagram account has been nuked. Richards didn’t respond to requests for comment about her treatment by the Garden’s staff, other than to ask that WIRED not use her real name.
(An MSG spokesperson didn't respond to detailed questions about the treatment of Richards. But in a court filing, Garden lawyers said the allegation that “Eversole directed the use of facial recognition software to monitor the activities of a transgender woman” was “a clear attempt to cast Eversole in a negative light”—one carried out in “excessive, needless detail.”)
Richards was banned from the Garden, right when the Knicks have been fielding their best teams in decades. “Mr. Eversole [f]abricated a stalking allegation to justify banning” her from the Garden, according to Ingrasselino's suit. Every knowledgeable MSG security source we spoke to about this felt the charge was a smear. But it worked.
If a plutocrat’s corporate enforcer can put Richards in that position, it opens any of us to being the subject of the next paranoid campaign. “You have all this work going into tracking someone who's not doing anything tangibly wrong,” the second ex-staffer says.
These Garden security sources—and several others—claim the pursuit of Richards was very much in character for Eversole, who brought an intensity to his role at the Garden that colleagues alternatively described as scary, cartoonish, ruthlessly effective, or a combination of all three.
IV. “HE PULLS THE STRINGS”
Around the office, Eversole would flash his gun “like he was in Miami Vice in the ’80s,” a fourth former staffer says. Sometimes the gun was in a shoulder holster; other times it’d be on his hip. “He'd use it as an intimidating factor, put his hand on the gun.” Ingrasselino also alleged in his complaint that Eversole displayed his gun in the office “in a manner intended to intimidate people.” Eversole’s former coworkers added that, in their experience, carrying a gun in this way was the opposite of standard practice for pro sports security staff. These sources back up Ingrasselino’s allegation that Eversole encouraged others to come to work strapped. “Shoulder holsters, there's a time and place for them. An office building is not one of them,” the second ex-staffer says. In August of 2024, Eversole posted to Facebook a picture of a black cat with pink claws, its paw lying on a revolver. An Eversole family member commented, “Best pic ever.”
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