Donald Trump, Knicks fan, heads back to New York to root on his team

NEW YORK (AP) — There was a time when Donald Trump was just another celebrity sitting courtside at New York Knicks games. He was famous, but not yet flanked by Secret Service agents or defined by the politics that have left him deeply unpopular in his hometown.

Now, more than a decade after attending his last Knicks game at Madison Square Garden, Trump is making a rare trip back to New York City as president to cheer for them in Game 3 of the NBA Finals against the San Antonio Spurs on Monday night. Invited by Knicks owner James Dolan, he will be the first sitting president to attend an NBA Finals game.

The Knicks are seeking their first championship since 1973, when Trump was 26 and a relative newcomer to the family real estate business that vaulted him to wealth and fame. Two years after that triumph, the team’s owners at the time hired him as a consultant as they looked to sell the arena.

Trump has been to more major sporting events than any of his predecessors, including the Super Bowl and Daytona 500, golf's Ryder Cup in the New York City suburbs, where he was cheered, and last year's U.S. Open men’s tennis championship in Queens, where he was booed and blamed for long security lines.

On June 14, when he turns 80 while wrestling with myriad crises including the war with Iran, economic unease and court rulingsblunting his agenda, he will host a UFC fight on White House grounds. Trump also has expressed interest in attending soccer's World Cup, which kicks off this week across the United States, Mexico and Canada.

Trump is an avid sports fan, but the affinity he professes for the Knicks is different.

It speaks to the Republican president’s identity as a New Yorker and harkens to a bygone era where a front-row seat at a Knicks game was a chance for him and other boldface names to see and be seen.

In a city whose wealthy gatekeepers largely turned their noses at Trump's brash personality and playboy image in the 1990s and 2000s, the Garden’s Celebrity Row was one club where he felt at home.

“I’ve been a Knick fan for a long time,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last week, a day after New York rallied to win Game 1. “I watched that end of the game and they were dominant — really amazing.”

After another win Friday in San Antonio, the Knicks head home with a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series. They have won a remarkable 13 straight playoff games and last lost on April 23, uniting the city in a way unseen since the Knicks went to the NBA Finals twice in the 1990s.

Enter Trump. He returns to the Knicks zeitgeist not as the tabloid curiosity who once sat shoulder to shoulder with the late John F. Kennedy Jr. at a game in 1999, but as a president who is disliked by a majority of the city's Democratic voters.

Trump, who gave up his lifelong New York residency for Florida in 2019, is making his first trip to New York City since he spoke at the United Nations in September. In 2024, he went on trial in the city and was convicted of 34 felony counts related to hush money paid on his behalf during his 2016 campaign.

Knicks fans, though, do not seem to be concerned so much with his politics, but that his attendance — and the hoopla accompanying it — could mess up the team’s momentum. The Knicks said people going to the game should arrive at least two hours before tipoff for airport-style security screening.

“Why does Donald Trump always have to ruin a good thing?” U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, an avid Knicks fan and the House Democratic leader, told CNN. “Like, literally, the Knicks haven’t been in the NBA finals for 27 years. The city is trying to celebrate this. We’ve embraced this team, and this guy has to inject himself.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat who struck up a cordial relationship with Trump after the two met in November, was more inviting.

“We’re excited to welcome anyone and everyone who’s rooting for the Knicks in this moment," said Mamdani, who will also be at the game — albeit, not with Trump.

Last week, as Trump began floating the idea of attending a game, New York magazine published an article, “Is Trump Really a Knicks Fan? An Investigation.” The story, filled with pictures of Trump at Knicks games from 1991 to 2014, described him as a “textbook example of a celebrity bandwagon fan."

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver disagrees.

“Before he ever ran for office, he was a big Knicks fan,” Silver told reporters last week. “I’ve been with the league for a long time. I was there at many Knicks games with him in the old days.”

Trump and the Knicks came into existence the same year, 1946.

His affiliation with the team — at least in the public record — dates to 1975 when he acted as a real estate adviser to the then-owners of the Knicks and Madison Square Garden, who were looking to sell the building known in a bit of Trump-style branding as “The World’s Most Famous Arena."

Trump claimed to reporters at the time that two groups of “Arab oil interests” were interested in paying $50 million to $75 million. But the arena’s leadership passed on the idea, saying it was “not conceivable” to make such a deal during the Middle East oil crisis raging at the time.

Trump was not much of a known entity when the Knicks won their only championships in 1970 and 1973.

By the time they rebounded in the 1990s, Trump was front and center, taking his then-wife Marla Maples to Game 3 of the NBA Finals in 1994 and his current wife, first lady Melania Trump, to Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals in 1999. In between, he added to his Knicks fan bona fides with a cameo in the Knicks-themed Whoopi Goldberg film “Eddie” in 1996.

Back then, Trump was a more of a mythic figure than a consequential one, known as much for the women he dated and married as the buildings he built.

But just as those Knicks came up short in the NBA Finals against Hakeem Olajuwon and the Houston Rockets and David Robinson and the Spurs, Trump was running into problems of his own. His business empire was in disarray after his casinos fell into financial trouble and his airline, Trump Shuttle, went out of business.

Like the Knicks, Trump went into rebuilding mode and charted a new course: reality TV with NBC's “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice,” and then, politics. On a Knicks TV broadcast in 2010, he hinted at a possible presidential run.

That same year, as the Knicks struggled to recapture the magic of the 1990s, Trump recorded a video trying to persuade LeBron James to join the team.

“The real winners of the world want to be here," Trump told him.

FILE - President Donald Trump watches Derrick Lewis fight Blagoy Ivanov, right, at UFC 244 at Madison Square Garden, Nov. 2, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci, File)

FILE - Donald Trump, right, talks to an unidentified man from the stands at Madison Square Garden during the New York Knicks game against the Dallas Mavericks on Jan. 11, 2006, in New York. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens, File)

FILE - Actor Elliott Gould, left, joins Donald Trump, center, and Marla Maples at courtside during an NBA basketball game between the Phoenix Suns and the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden, in New York, March 6, 1991. (AP Photo/Steve Freeman, File)

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Triple-murderer Erin Patterson appealed her convictions Wednesday for poisoning four of her estranged husband’s relatives with death cap mushrooms.

Three judges of the Victoria state Court of Appeal are hearing her appeal over two days against her convictions on three counts of murder and one of attempted murder relating to a lunch of beef Wellington pastries she prepared at her rural home in Leongatha in July 2023.

Prosecutors are appealing the leniency of her sentence. The 51-year-old was sentenced in September last year to life in prison and must serve at least 33 years behind bars before she can apply for release on parole.

Prosecutors will argue at the hearing Thursday she should be sentenced for life without possibility of parole, Prosecutor Brendan Kissane said.

Defense lawyer Richard Edney’s first ground for appeal Wednesday was an error that resulted in jury members being sequestered in the same hotel as a police witness and members of the prosecution team.

“This was a very serious breach of sequestration,” Edney told the court.

Kissane said there was no evidence to support that ground.

“There was no actual contact between any juror and any other person,” Kissane said.

Another defense lawyer, Veronika Drago, said there was no evidence that Patterson had read online posts that reported death cap mushrooms had been seen near the towns of Loch and Outtrim.

The trial heard evidence from a telecommunications expert that Patterson’s phone connected to towers near Outtrim and Loch.

Drago said the evidence was that Patterson’s phone had possibly been in the area.

“That in and of itself, in our submission, illustrates just how dangerous and unfair that evidence was” on Patterson’s trial, Drago said.

Prosecutor Jeremy McWilliams said the evidence showed that Patterson had an opportunity to deliberately source death cap mushrooms shortly before the lunch.

Another ground for appeal was that Prosecutor Nanette Rogers’ cross-examination of Patterson over five days had been “unfair and oppressive.”

The defense team also argued that trial judge Christopher Bale had caused “unfair prejudice” by allowing evidence from Patterson’s Facebook “friends” into the trial.

Patterson’s estranged husband, Simon Patterson, was invited to the fatal lunch but did not attend.

His parents, Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, died. Heather’s husband, Ian Wilkinson, spent weeks in hospital, but survived.

Patterson argued during her trial that the poisoning was an accident.

Drago argued a miscarriage of justice occurred when the prosecution opened their case saying there was no evidence of a motive for the poisonings, then closed the case suggesting Patterson's animosity toward her husband's parents and the broader Patterson family was the motive.

Questioned by one of the three judges, Justice Lesley Taylor, Drago said she was not accusing prosecutors of deliberate professional misconduct.

“It is certainly not a direct allegation or suggestion of that, but what is clear in our submission from the reading of all of the material is that where things started and where it finished by the end of the prosecution case were different,” Drago said.

If Patterson's appeal succeeds, the judges could overturn her convictions and order a retrial.

Patterson did not attend court on Wednesday and watched the hearing by video in prison.

In pretrial testimony only made public after her trial, Simon Patterson said he suspected his wife had deliberately made him seriously ill with dishes. No poisons were ever found.

Erin Patterson was initially charged with three counts of attempting to murder him three times between November 2021 and September 2022. She had denied all charges.

Prosecutors dropped all charges relating to the husband before her trial began in April 2025.

This story has corrected the lawyer's name to Drago, not Vargo, throughout.

FILE - Erin Patterson is escorted away from the Supreme Court of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, on Sept. 8, 2025. (Joel Carrett/AAP Image via AP, File)