Florida’s AG Wants To Charge WNBA Player With Crime Of Playing Basketball

Let’s not insult each other: it’s highly unlikely that Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier watched the Sky-Fever WNBA game this past Saturday. For all the performative concern about the sanctity of women’s sports, no one believes he sat down with a cold one to watch women’s basketball. But a clip crossed his timeline, and where the rest of us saw a flagrant foul, our boy saw a moment — ripe for newsjacking, juicy enough to turn a MAGA-elite head — and took it.

After the Chicago Sky’s DiJonai Carrington was ejected Saturday for a Flagrant 2 on the Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunningham — Carrington came from behind on a fast-break layup and caught Cunningham across the head and neck, drawing blood, an ejection, and a $1,000 fine, Uthmeier took to X with a warning. “The WNBA knows better than to play games down here in Florida,” he posted, “because I’ll be charging people with assault.” Later, apparently after revisiting the elements, he issued a correction: “I should probably clarify … assault and battery.”

Good instinct, that correction. A hard foul is contact, and contact is battery, not assault, a distinction they cover fairly early at Georgetown Law, which is where Uthmeier went. It is the only thing about this he got right.

Because there’s about a century of law that makes it pretty clear nothing that happened in the Sky-Fever game is a crime. When you step onto the court, you consent to the physical contact that is a normal, foreseeable part of the game — the elbows, the box-outs, the hard fouls that draw a whistle and a fine. That consent is why the assault statute goes quiet the second the ball is tipped, and it is why criminal prosecutions for in-game conduct are nearly nonexistent. The entire modern American canon is essentially one 1975 case, in which a Bruin took his hockey stick to an opponent’s face and the jury hung. The rare convictions that do exist come out of Canada, involve players swinging lumber or throwing sucker punches, and produced injuries — a fractured skull, a broken neck, careers ended — that make a bloodied lip look like exactly what it is. Todd Bertuzzi drove a man’s face into the ice and finished his career and he got a conditional discharge.

Carrington’s actions were a foul, plain and simple.

And, of course, as Uthmeier knows, the WNBA does not have a team in Florida. Threatening to prosecute conduct in games that are not played, in a state the league does not visit, against a defendant who will never set foot in his jurisdiction is pretty obviously grandstanding.

Which is what Uthmeier does. This is the same AG who asked himself for a formal legal opinion — on Martin Luther King Jr. Day — declaring that the real victims of racial discrimination are white people, and who went after law firms over their DEI policies in a bid to piggyback on the Trump administration’s war on Biglaw. The WNBA post is cut from the same cloth. Carrington, who is Black, fouled Cunningham, who is white, then posted “WHITE PRIVILEGE” and tagged the Fever when she got ejected. Cunningham, already a conservative favorite for her comments opposing transgender athletes in women’s sports, waved the whole race framing off. Uthmeier saw a white-grievance layup and took it.

And he’s not subtle about it. Jezebel filed it under “pick me energy,” and others piled on, which is about right for a chief legal officer freelancing prosecutions on X for a league that doesn’t play in his state.

Earlier: State AG Asks For Formal Legal Opinion From Himself
Florida AG Declares War On Law Firms Over DEI
FL Attorney General Plays Stupid Games, Wins Stupid Prizes

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1