A History of Athletes Getting Busted With Prostitutes

Image via Complex Original

Year: 1990

Calling up a prostitute is always putting yourself in a pretty risky situation. Especially when the service you're patronizing has been recently busted and replaced with an entire undercover police operation. Ringing any bells for you, James Worthy? The former Lakers forward found himself in this messy situation during the 1990-1991 NBA season when he was arrested in a Houston hotel for trying to buy some quality time in the bedroom with a cop. Worthy was taken in during the afternoon, and released right before tip-off of the Lakers' game against the Houston Rockets that night. He didn't, however, make it in time to actually play in the game.

Year: 1999

Darryl Strawberry, while undeniably talented, was also never a stranger to controversy during his playing days with the New York Mets, L.A. Dodgers, San Francisco Giants, and New York Yankees. In the final season of his career—then with the Yankees—Strawberry proved that he still hadn't outgrown his unpredictable behavior when he was arrested in Tampa, FL, for possession of cocaine, and trying to solicit sex from an undercover policewoman. Strawberry earned himself a 140-day suspension from baseball for that one, as well as 21 months of community service and probation from the courts.

Year: 1999

When you're playing in the Super Bowl, getting arrested for soliciting a prostitute the night leading up to the big game just doesn't seem like the thing you should be choosing. Apparently, no one told that to former Falcons cornerback, Eugene Robinson, who, on the eve of Super Bowl XXXIII, was caught trying to pick up some questionable company for the night. Oh, and you want to know the icing on the cake with this one? Robinson had just been given the league's Bart Starr Award in recognition of his "high moral character." Yeesh. Robinson was able to play in the game the next day, but the Falcons were beaten by the Broncos 34-19.

Year: 2000

Hockey players are just a different breed of crazy sometimes, and former NHL left winger, Kevin Stevens, certainly qualified as one of those players throughout his time in the league. Known for his intense, physical style of play, Stevens apparently wasn't afraid to live his life on the edge off-the-ice either, as we saw from his 2000 arrest for possession of drug paraphenalia, and solicting a prostitute. After a disturbance at a motel in Collinsville, IL, had been reported to the police, Stevens and the woman were busted in on by the cops, and found with crack cocaine. Crack, a prostitute, and some seedy motel in the middle of nowhere? Does it really get any lower than that?

Year: 2004, 2006

This isn't the type of list that you want to be distinguishing yourself on, but Neagle takes the dubious honor by being the only athlete to have two separate incidents to his name. In the final year of his contract with the Colorado Rockies, Neagle was caught trying to receive oral sex from a prostitute, prompting the Rockies to void the final year of his contract, and his wife to leave him. Two years later, unsigned and out of the league, a similar incident occured, and Neagle was slapped with 40 hours of community service. Some guys can just never learn, right?

Year: 2005

With cornerback Fred Smoot acting as the lead organizer, various members of the 2005 Minnesota Vikings were discovered to have rented a party boat on Lake Minnetonka that included some pretty explicit entertainment. Flying in exotic dancers all the way from Atlanta, the former Vikings engaged in numerous sexual activities with the women before the boat's disgusted captain eventually cut the trip short. Smoot and his teammate, Bryant McKinnie, ended up taking the brunt of the fallout. Both were charged with criminal disorderly conduct, while then-head coach, Mike Tice, was eventually fired after the team's season ended, having both failed to make the playoffs and maintain any sort of discipline with his squad.

Year: 2006

Grizzlies forward Zach Randolph has been one of the league's best big men for a few years now but, in the early stages of his career, Randolph could never seem to get his game or his personal life figured out. Exhibit A of his troubles came in 2006 during his checkered tenure with the Trail Blazers. Randolph was accused of sexually assaulting a prostitute in a hotel room. The details of the entire encounter are pretty graphic but, FWIW, the case was eventually dropped. Ever since he left the Jail Blazers, Randolph has taken some serious steps to improve his image off-the-court and, honestly, he really had nowhere to go but up.

Year: 2007

Sometimes, when your team takes a tough loss, it's easy to point to the players and accuse them of not caring enough, or not putting their hearts into the game. Often, this assumption is wrong, but it becomes a lot easier to say when your team is found to have been partying with prostitutes and partying after their defeat. Case in point: The Czech national soccer team which, after falling to Germany in March of 2007, decided to throwdown at the team's hotel with some pretty interesting company. Specifically, six prostitutes. The women came into the room and joined team members Tomas Rosicky, Jan Polak, Marek Cech, Martin Jiranek and Ujfalusi who were, in their defense, celebrating Ujfalusi's birthday. The national soccer association wasn't so sympathetic with them, though, as they fined the entire team for failing to keep better control of the players.

Year: 2007

Andray Blatche is one of those guys in the NBA who has always frustrated fans because of his maddeningly inconsistent level of play. His time with the Washington Wizards was constantly a game of stop-and-go and, even as one of the worst teams in the league, Washington finally had to say that they had enough when they let him sign with the Brooklyn Nets after the 2011-2012 season. However, let us never forget the undisputed lowlight of Blatche's time with the Wizards when, in 2007, the boneheaded forward tried to solicit sex from an undercover cop. Worse yet, he did this when he was trying to negotiate a new contract with the Wizards. That's not exactly what we'd call a power move, Andray.

Year: 2007

What better way to drown your sorrows after a tough loss than a trip to the brothel, right? That's what four members of the South Korean national soccer team thought, anyway, after they were handed an upset loss by Bahrain in the 2007 Asian Cup. Oh, and we should probably mention that they did this the night before the match too. After reports broke out that veteran team members Lee Woon-jae, Kim Sang-sik, Woo Sung-yong and Lee Dong-gook had all taken part in the scandalous activities, the players immediately made public apologies, and took responsiblity for their actions. Lucky for them, the team was able to pull it together and make it out of the group stage of the tournament before falling in the semifinals. 

Year: 2008

Does it get any more embarrassing than this story? After spending the night out at a Brazilian club, former AC Milan striker Ronaldo de Nazario brought home a few ladies for what he thought was going to be a wild evening. It certainly was, just not in the way that Ronaldo probably expected. The women accompanying him actually turned out to be transvestites and Ronaldo, so horrified by his mistake, asked them to leave and offered money to keep them quiet. But when they started asking for too much in return, Ronaldo refused to negotiate, and the prostitutes leaked the story to the press. Just try and name a worse way to get caught with your pants down.

Year: 2008

We all know that Charles Barkley is one of the most outrageous personalities in basketball, so it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that the Mound of Rebound would make it on this list. In late 2008, the Hall of Famer and TNT analyst was pulled over by the police for drunk driving, but that charge apparently wasn't enough for Barkley. He took the whole deal a bit further by admitting to the police officer questioning him that he was driving drunk because, "I was gonna drive around the corner and get a blow job." However, Barkley couldn't be charged with solicitation because he hadn't actually picked anyone up yet. You dodged a bullet there, Chuck.

Date: 2009

Alex loves himself some blondes. Madam Kristin Davis, of Eliot Spitzer fame, put A-Rod on blast in 2009. After meeting him in a gym in Philadelphia, she gave him a business card to her escort firm. After he spent money on some of her girls, Rodriguez started exchanging emails with Davis and the two eventually became an item. We're not sure why she outed him but he's lucky he wasn't arrested. Alex always seems to slime his way out of trouble.

Year: 2009

Prostitution may be legal in France, but that freedom still comes with certain restrictions. First and foremost, the girl has to be 18. Simple, right? Not for French footballers Franck Ribery, Karim Benzema and Sidney Govou, who learned that fact the hard way after an investigation concerning their involvement with an underage hooker was launched in 2010. The players had met the girl in question at a Parisian nightclub in 2009 and, allegedly, Ribery had sex with the young woman, with Govou and Benzema acting as witnesses. Luckily for the players, though, the case was eventually dropped. 

Year: 2010

When you're engaged to a woman as beautiful as Abigail Clancy, you'd think that you'd be pretty well-satisfied in the sack, wouldn't you? Apparently, the British lingerie model wasn't enough to please English footballer Peter Crouch, who was caught paying for sex with a teenaged prostitute back in 2010. Playing for Tottenham at the time, Crouch had been in Madrid on a weekend trip with friends, and apparently threw down a 1,000 euros for a quickie with the young woman, who goes by the name Monica Mint. Cheating on a woman like Clancy is never a good move, but the kicker here? Even Mint knew that Crouch was making a dumb decision, as she was later quoted as saying, "I can't believe he paid for sex with someone like me when he has a gorgeous woman like her at home." You know you've done wrong when even a prostitute is questioning your judgment.

Year: 2010

Lawrence Taylor's career off-the-field has been anything but smooth since he entered the NFL in 1981. For years, his problems mainly centered around drug usage, but in 2011, Taylor pleaded guilty to the charge of having sex with a 16-year-old prostitute in Miami. Sentenced to six years probation as part of a plea agreement, Taylor was also registered as a level-one sex offender for his crime. The former Giant will always be known for his wrecking ball style of play during his days in the league but, unfortunately, he's taken the same approach to his personal life too many times.

Year: 2011

Wayne Rooney might be an all-time great on the pitch, but he certainly isn't going to be a candidate for Husband of the Year any time soon. It doesn't seem like you can get much lower than having sex with a prostitute while you're married, but Rooney managed to top this by doing it while his wife was pregnant. In 2011, it came out that Rooney had been paying $2,000 per session to have sex with a British prostitute over a four-month period, and the English media quickly hopped on the story, subjecting Rooney to months of public scorn.

Year: 2011

In June of 2011, during the Copa America tournament, the Mexican national soccer team took a major hit when it was revealed that eight members of their squad had brought prostitutes to their rooms at a hotel in Quito, Ecuador. These guys basically brought the punishment onto themselves, too. After reporting that some iPads and iPhones had been stolen from them, security tapes showed the women entering the players' rooms, thereby implicating all the guilty parties. The players—a bunch that included Jonathan dos Santos, Javier Cortes and Marco Fabian—were all dismissed from the team for the remainder of the tournament, and Mexico went on to lose every one of their group stage matches.

Year: 2012

This story is probably the craziest of them all, mainly because the athlete in question wasn't busted with a prostitute, but actually was a prostitute. After the news began to leak that former U.S. Olympic track star, Suzy Favor Hamilton, had been working in Vegas as a high-end call girl, Hamilton herself came out on her Twitter account and admitted that the stories were true. Working under the name, "Kelly Lundy," Hamilton would charge $600 an hour for her services, and lived something of a double life between the time she spent in Las Vegas, and that which she spent with her family in Madison, Wis. A former student-athlete at the University of Wisconsin, Favor Hamilton had previously been the namesake for the Big Ten Conference's Female Athlete of the Year award but, in the wake of her admissions, her name was stripped from the honor.

Year: 2012

If Mario Balotelli is going to cheat on his girlfriend with a prostitute, you'd hope that he at least wouldn't do it with the same girl that Wayne Rooney used, wouldn't you? Apparently, though, Super Mario couldn't help himself, as he admitted to going behind his girlfriend's back with Rooney's ex-call girl, Jennifer Thompson, in 2012. Kudos to Balotelli for owning up to what he did, but it still couldn't save the relationship. The two broke up shortly after, and Balotelli is now engaged to his fiance, Fanny Rôbért Neguesha. Treat her right, Mario.

Year: 2013

Cleveland Browns linebacker, Quentin Groves, isn't the type of guy that you see making headlines every Sunday and, honestly, if not for his arrest concerning a prostitution sting this past offseason, we probably still wouldn't know who he is. In April, though, Groves found himself getting attention for all the wrong reasons when he was taken in by an undercover police officer posing as a prostitute. Tough break for Groves, but when you play for the Cleveland Browns, you're probably used to dealing with public shame and ridicule.