Good morning. It's Wednesday. We'll look at a New York Knicks fan who Madison Square Garden says is not welcome. We'll also look at two polls that suggest the race for governor in New York is tightening as Election Day approaches. |
 | | Larry Hutcher with a photograph of John Starks and Patrick Ewing of the New York Knicks.Desiree Rios/The New York Times |
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Larry Hutcher doesn't know if he will be cheering or jeering, or both, when the Knicks play their home opener on Friday against the Detroit Pistons. Madison Square Garden says he is not welcome. |
Hutcher wants Justice Lyle Frank of State Supreme Court in Manhattan to order the Garden to let him in. The judge, who heard arguments in the case on Tuesday, has promised a decision soon. |
Hutcher is a longtime Knicks fan — he has had season tickets since the 1975-76 season. He long sat in the fifth row behind one of the baskets. He was the season ticket holder honored at a game last year. |
"I had people that had tickets for Eric Clapton and concerts and the Beacon — they couldn't use them," Hutcher told my colleague Kris Rhim. "They are angry at me. They go, 'What did we do?'" |
Hutcher countered with a letter to Hal Weidenfeld, the senior vice president for legal and business affairs of Madison Square Garden Entertainment. It was Weidenfeld who had informed Hutcher of the ban, citing a New York State Bar Association rule on communication about a pending case. The rule was invoked to forestall the possibility of one of the firm's lawyers speaking with a Madison Square Garden employee about the litigation against the Garden — the likelihood of which is infinitely small, in Hutcher's view. |
Hutcher told Weidenfeld that was a misinterpretation of the rule and was also unbecoming, considering that he had lived through "many horrendous" seasons with the Knicks. |
That prompted another letter, this time from Randy Mastro, a lawyer representing Madison Square Garden Entertainment. Mastro said that Hutcher's tickets had expired and that "M.S.G. decided not to renew them and returned your deposit, as is M.S.G.'s right under New York law." Mastro said that Hutcher was "not being singled out or treated any differently than any other lawyer or law firm currently suing M.S.G.," although he added that M.S.G. appreciated Hutcher's longtime support of the Knicks. |
Hutcher did what lawyers do: he and his colleagues went to court, challenging what they called the Garden's "misguided" and "erroneous" interpretation of the bar association rule, an interpretation they said violated state civil rights law. |
In court papers, Hutcher said in the lawsuit that it was not the first time he had been involved in legal action against Madison Square Garden, but it was the first time the Garden had moved to keep him out. He accused the Garden of using its power "in a vindictive, arbitrary and capricious manner to settle petty grievances, perceived slights and to exact revenge." |
The lawsuit challenging the ban said that "almost all" of the other lawyers in Hutcher's firm "have no involvement or knowledge" of the ticket resellers' case. But after Tuesday's hearing with Justice Frank, a spokeswoman for the Garden said "it is not unreasonable that while in active litigation, we would want to preserve our right to protect ourselves against improper disclosure and discovery." She said that once the resellers' case is resolved, the "tickets will be reinstated." |
Enjoy a sunny day near the mid-50s. At night, it's mostly clear. Temperatures will drop to around the low 40s. |
In effect until Monday (Diwali). |
Deposition day for Trump in a defamation case |
Today, former President Donald Trump is scheduled to be questioned under oath in a defamation case. It was brought by E. Jean Carroll, a writer and longtime advice columnist for Elle magazine who, in a 2019 book and an excerpt in New York magazine, accused Trump of raping her in the mid-1990s in a dressing room at the Fifth Avenue department store Bergdorf Goodman. |
Trump has said that he never met her, that she was "totally lying" and that she was not his "type." Trump's lawyer wanted to delay the deposition. After Judge Lewis Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan said no to that request, Trump blasted Carroll in a lengthy social media post, repeating the kinds of statements that had prompted her to sue him in the first place. |
Today's questioning is expected to take place at Mar-a-Lago, the private club in Florida where Trump lives. It is unclear whether Trump's deposition will become public. He could ask that it be treated as confidential; Judge Kaplan has already approved a routine order that would allow Trump and Carroll to keep their depositions confidential throughout the pretrial discovery process if they choose to. |
 | | Mustafa Hussain for The New York Times |
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Hochul retains her lead, but it's smaller |
 | | Amir Hamja for The New York Times |
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Gov. Kathy Hochul, the Democrat in the race, saw her lead over the Republican candidate, Representative Lee Zeldin, recede to 11 percentage points, an eight-point drop from a month ago in a Siena College poll. She led by only four percentage points in a Quinnipiac University poll. |
The smaller gap was the latest sign of momentum for Republicans and suggested that voters in New York were becoming more concerned about the direction of the state. Some 61 percent of Democrats in the Siena poll said New York was on the right track, while 87 percent of Republicans and a majority of the independent voters questioned said the state was going in the wrong direction. |
Voters in the Quinnipiac poll, especially Republicans and independents, listed crime as the most urgent issue, followed by inflation and the need to protect democracy. Zeldin has made his tough-on-crime stance the centerpiece of his campaign as he called for tighter bail laws and more resources for the police. |
My colleague Luis Ferré-Sadurní says the difference between the two polls released on Tuesday appears to hinge on different assumptions about who will vote. |
Siena's sampling presumes that 47 percent of those voting will be registered Democrats, 31 percent will be Republicans and 17 percent will be independents or registered with a third party. By contrast, Quinnipiac projected that more than twice as many independent and third-party voters would cast ballots — 36 percent — and that 39 percent would be Democrats and 24 percent Republicans. |
Brooklyn, 6:30 a.m. I'm out for an early run, intent on shaving seconds off my pace. Very focused. |
I see an older woman crossing at the corner. She stops. Thank you, I say, thinking she wants to stay out of my way. |
Will you take a photo of me? she says. |
No, I start to say as I'm jogging in place, I need to finish my run and get back to get my son to school. |
Please stop and take my picture, she says. I am going to a funeral and I am old. I am not going to always look this good. |
I notice how lovely she looks. She is wearing a great hat and beautiful red lipstick. |
I stop bouncing up and down and take two pictures of her, beaming, and then she walks with me as I start to jog slowly. |
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. |
| Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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