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@THISHOUR WITH BERMAN AND MICHAELA

Atlanta CEO Levenson Selling Hawks; New Video of Punch by Ray Rice; Look at MH-17 Flight Search; Williams, Kate Expecting 2nd Baby.

Aired September 8, 2014 - 11:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: Racially charged comments are costing another NBA owner his team. Bruce Levenson will sell his controlling stake in the Atlanta Hawks because of an e-mail that he sent back in 2012. In it, Levenson said quote, "My theory is the black crowds scared away the whites and there are simply not enough affluent black fans to build a significant season ticket base."

He goes on the say, quote, "I think southern whites simply were not comfortable being in an arena or at a bar where they are in the minority."

In a CNN exclusive, Martin Savidge sat down with the Hawks' new CEO who addressed Levenson's decision to step away. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STEVE KOONIN, CEO, ATLANTA HAWKS: It's an investigation and the investigation was coming to an end and the NBA, rather than fight, Bruce said "I am putting my interest up for sale and walking away."

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's what it sounds like, I'm just walking away. There's no real repercussion for him. He sells the team but he'll make money.

KOONIN: He will make money. That is an outcome of this. I do think there are there's significant repercussions for him.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PEREIRA: Imagine being a brand new CEO, you get a new job and, oops, you have to deal with this. Not everyone is bashing Levenson, in an op-ed today at time.com, NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writes, quote, "There are assumptions he makes that are cringe worthy but the questions about how to attract more white fans were entirely reasonable. Levenson is a businessman asking reasonable questions about how to put customers in seats."

Oh, you know I have to discuss this.

(LAUGHTER)

Rachel Nichols, host of "Unguarded"; and CNN commentator, L.Z. Granderson. They're both here. L.Z. Granderson, why don't we start with you?

What do you make of Kareem's assertion this was a businessman's decision.

L.Z. GRANDERSON, CNN COMMENTATOR: I had a conversation late last night once I read the complete e-mail.

PEREIRA: Yeah. It takes a while. It's lengthy.

GRANDERSON: It's pretty lengthy. Full of spelling errors.

RACHEL NICHOLS, CNN HOST, UNGUARDED: A lot of different kinds of racism.

(LAUGHTER)

GRANDERSON: It certainly is. My first thoughts were your problem isn't the fact that you have an arena full of black people and your cheerleaders are all black, your problem is that your team sucks.

(LAUGHTER)

That's first. Because the Atlanta Hawks does not have a problem filling the arena if they happen to be a good team.

My second issue is you want to diversify your revenue stream, there's nothing wrong with having that conversation.

PEREIRA: Sure, and you should have that conversation.

GRANDERSON: And you should but the conversation isn't why are there so many black people everywhere. The question is how do we get other people to come enjoy the game.

(CROSSTALK)

PEREIRA: To build up one you don't need to bring down the other.

GRANDERSON: Exactly.

It's interesting to think Rachel, too, I want to talk about the e-mail from whence it came in a second but you would think an owner of a team in Atlanta which has a really large and affluent black community would be aware of the conversations he was even having in an internal e- mail.

NICHOLS: Absolutely. And that is guy who came out over this past summer and said that they need to have a zero tolerance policy against people like Donald Sterling. Well, zero tolerance means zero tolerance. And I get what Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is saying. I understand. He is more qualified than me to discuss shades of racism, the life he has lived. I won't get into that. But I can say that if you are talking about any shade of racism, you are talking about too much in today's NBA. This is a post-Donald Sterling world. They are still trying to win fans back and they have said zero, nada, nothing, and this is more than nothing. Period.

PEREIRA: Well, do a little follow the bouncing ball for viewers understanding how -- 2012 people will be scratching their head trying to figure out why is it we're only hearing about this now?

NICHOLS: This is fascinating. This is information CNN broke. Self- reporting is the way the NBA has been portraying this. Abuse Levenson self-reported the e-mail. Technically, sure. But what happened was G.M. Danny Ferry was in a meeting, a conference call where he was reading a scouting report prepared by someone outside the organization full time but still and it had a racist comment in it and the fact that Danny Ferry would repeat this comment in a meeting disturbed enough people within the organization that they called for an internal investigation. They talked to 19 different people within the organization about, gee, what is this franchise's attitude toward rates in this city of Atlanta. They reviewed over 24,000 documents and in those 24,000 pieces of evidence, one of them was this e-mail. And once that e-mail came to light, some of the other partners said to Levenson, hey, we've got to report this, this is important. That's how it got to the NBA. Now, Bruce Levenson gets credit for instead of fighting it the way Donald Sterling did and insisting he did nothing wrong --

(CROSSTALK)

PEREIRA: You have to give him that.

GRANDERSON: I don't have to give him anything.

(LAUGHTER)

PEREIRA: Fair enough.

NICHOLS: We do say sometimes that while taking into account the initial action, which is important, you also take into account how you behave after that initial action.

PEREIRA: OK, to that point, then. So what happened now? Enough new CEO who, lucky fellow, gets to take over after all of this.

NICHOLS: And you get a team and you get a team.

PEREIRA: He's going to have to do a lot of work to do undo what has been done there in Atlanta, L.Z.

GRANDERSON: You can't un-do that. People aren't gong to forget this whole thing that just occurred because you have new faces. Because just --

(CROSSTALK)

PEREIRA: A lot of hard to do.

GRANDERSON: After Donald Sterling the word was he's not the only one. Why? Because the NBA has known about Donald Sterling for 30 years.

(CROSSTALK)

PEREIRA: Do you think we'll see more investigations into other owners?

GRANDERSON: The question is, this is a two-year-old e-mail that was sent to high-ranking people who did not report it two years ago. So it goes back to Mark Cuban's statement about the slippery slope. Why did he say that getting rid of Donald Sterling was a slippery slope? Perhaps he knew that some of his brethren had similar opinions and ideas about race.

PEREIRA: You think we're starting to slide?

NICHOLS: What's wrong with asking the question? The slippery slope argument never holds to me in any scenario because that implies gee, we may judge things wrong so we can't ever ask the question, we have no judgment at all, we can't possibly even get into this. I think these questions have to be asked and where the NBA has drawn the line is important.

PEREIRA: I'm going ask you both to stay put.

We have to show you some video. It's a big story. Upsetting video. It's extremely disturbing video, Ray Rice. You've probably already seen it on line. We'll talk about it in a second.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PEREIRA: Here we go. New video released this morning of NFL star Ray Rice posted by TMZ Sports that appears to show the actual punch that got the Baltimore Ray Rice suspended for domestic violence.

We have to warn you, it's disturbing to watch this.

TMZ says this is security cam footage from February in an Atlantic City hotel. You see eventually Rice's then-fiance kind of swats at him as he walks by him in the hallway. They both get into the elevator. Once they get into the elevator it would appear that the two of them seem to exchange words. You'll see it happen here in a second. There's some sort of words. She kind of swats at him again. But then he hits her and then he really slugs her and she hits her head hard, knocking her unconscious. We've slowed it down for you. I don't want to keep playing this over and over because it's really upsetting. The elevator door opens and she drags her out which is the part we saw previously.

Rachel and L.Z. are back again. What's -- it was interesting, we've been talking about this video. It's upsetting to watch and at first I said it's shocking. It isn't because we knew for her to have --

(CROSSTALK)

It's disturbing. Not shocking.

NICHOLS: Not shocking. Because we've previously seen the video of him dragging her unconscious out of an elevator. PEREIRA: But maybe we could have suspended thinking maybe there was

another reason.

(CROSSTALK)

NICHOLS: The NFL said the video wasn't made available to them and they asked for it. The question I have is if it was available to TMZ, if they were able to obtain the video -- and I'm sure they paid for it, but you can pay for stuff -- why didn't the NFL obtain this video? It was obtainable.

PEREIRA: Right. They said there was a thorough investigation done. Now the second part of this -- we can talk about the two-game suspension in a second because that's going to --

(CROSSTALK)

GRANDERSON: That's an hour show.

(CROSSTALK)

PEREIRA: We've got four minutes here, folks. Why wasn't there a criminal charge to begin with? A crime was committed here.

GRANDERSON: That to me is the beginning. Like a lot of people are mat at the NFL and the Ravens. I'm mad at the judicial system that failed this woman and society at large, because here you have clearly an act of violence, clearly an act of violence. And to give him a slap on the wrist, an opportunity to even have this wiped from his record tells you how powerful money, fame, and sports is in society. And interestingly enough, it was reported that the same judge that gave him a pass actually put a mom in jail because she had a gun on her from another state and didn't know that that state's law. It was presented in front of her and he put her in jail for carrying a gun for not knowing the laws in that new state. Same guy put her in jail but gave Ray Rice a pass.

PEREIRA: We can do another show on that. Let's talk about the two- game suspension now. Is there a chance that could be revisited, Rachel?

NICHOLS: It's complicated. The NFL collective bargaining agreement says the big office can't. However, this is by all accounts a special case. The backlash against this is huge, as it should be. And you have even players, even current players who are usually very reluctant --

(CROSSTALK)

PEREIRA: They don't talk about this kind of stuff.

NICHOLS: They're calling for something to be done. I want to show you a tweet from Terence Knighten, a defensive tackle from the Denver Broncos. You might remember him at the Super bowl they were calling him pot roast.

(LAUGHTER)

And he's saying something important. He says, "As players we must speak up, stand up for what's right. I don't give a dam who you are and how much money you make, no place for this." He tweeted that the NFL should suspend Rice for a year, he should be thrown in jail. And I think you'll start seeing more players saying this. You're certainly having people outside the NFL community saying this and there's now some calls that even if the collective bargaining agreement says they can't, quote, "try him twice," it's up to the Ravens and Ray Rice to do what we were talking about in the earlier segment. Bruce Levenson of the Atlanta Hawks went to the NBA and said, "I give, I recuse myself." There are people suggesting the Ravens and Ray Rice should say we are going to do the right thing. We are going to take him away from the game for a year.

And, L.Z., speaking of hour-long conversations, even longer we can talk about it. It points again, and I feel like it will come up again, into a bigger problem than violence against women in the NFL.

GRANDERSON: It's not just the NFL.

PEREIRA: Right.

GRANDERSON: We still have cultural problems understanding the severity of domestic violence. When you think about Beyonce's big hit "Drunken Love" and the throw away line that made fun of domestic violence, you think about how much fans still support Chris Brown despite his domestic violence, we have a problem about that issue.

PEREIRA: And it needs to be addressed but hopefully we'll see changes. This conversation won't die here.

I feel like the two of you are going to be very, very busy on this topic and also the topic of the Hawks.

Thanks for spending time with me. Two whole blocks.

GRANDERSON: Thank you.

NICHOLS: Thank you.

PEREIRA: All right, L.Z. and Rachel, thanks so much.

It has been six months since the Malaysia Airlines jumbo jet vanished into thin air. We are going to give you a look at where the search stands now.

Also, babies are all cute but could any other baby be cuter than Prince George? If you ask his parents you know what the answer will be. Guess what? They're having another one. We'll talk royal baby news in a second.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SARAH BAJC, PARTNER OF PHILLIP WOOD: As a group of family members we are gaining strength so we want you to know we are not going away and until they agree to pursue this more independently in a way we can feel confident in, we're going to get noisier and noisier.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PEREIRA: That was Sarah Bajc. Her partner, Phillip Wood, was aboard that flight 370. Nobody knows better how long it's been, the loved ones of the passengers aboard. Today marks sixth months since Malaysia Airlines flight 370 vanished without a trace. It has been month after month after month of agony. Not one speck of debris has been found. Not a solid lead. Not one bit of piece for the family members.

I want to turn to our safety analyst, David Soucie, author of the book "Why Planes Crash."

I can hardly believe it's been six months. I think many of us believed or hoped this mystery would be solved by now or that the wreckage at least would have been found yet here we sit. No answers.

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Yeah, it is tragic. My heart goes out to Sarah and the families. I can't believe it's been six months of them suffering through this. We need to get some answers. We need to get them as fast as we can, that's for sure.

PEREIRA: Any idea why there are no answers? Give us a sense of where you think maybe the problem is. I mean, we've been trying to figure this out since six months ago.

SOUCIE: Well, the interesting thing, Michaela, about this particular investigation, we have no evidence. We have nothing out there at all telling us what's going on. So in any investigation, all the investigations I've done, 80 percent of the work is preparation. 20 percent is the actual search and the work and the hands on. So what we're seeing here, in my estimation, is that they are really taking the time to make sure that the floor of the ocean is mapped properly so when they get the search vehicles out there, that they can do it as quickly and efficiently as possible. Remember when we had the Bluefin-21s in the water earlier? They were going super slow and that's because they didn't know what the terrain was. They couldn't preprogram the flight path, if you will, of the search vehicles. Now that they've got this area mapped, the search vehicles will be able to go at a much quicker rate and they'll be able to see much better and have a clearer definition of what they are looking at. I think that's what we're seeing. The amount of time it takes to prepare for such an enormous task of this search.

PEREIRA: I remember you talking about the importance of mapping. Right now they are back actively out there searching. That's the status of the search right now, right? There's no further updates to that?

SOUCIE: Well, they are not searching yet. What they are doing is mapping the floor in preparation for the search. The equipment for the search will be in Australia. They expect around October 4th or 5th. At that point, we'll see that piece of equipment get set up, the teams prepare, and then they'll start their expedition out and start going in with the investigation. So I'm just glad that we're getting this finally moving forward.

PEREIRA: And you reminded us how difficult it is, the search conditions are far from ideal in that part of the world.

David Soucie, we'll be with you as we cover this and lean on your expertise, as always. Thanks for joining.

SOUCIE: Thanks for having me.

All right. The duke and duchess are thrilled about their growing family. We'll bring you what details we know, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PRINCE WILLIAM: It's been a tricky few days, a week or so. But we're thrilled. It's great news. Early days, just things settle down and she feels a bit better. But the big news and the big international, so that's why that's all for now. Thank you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PEREIRA: Prince William confirming what we have heard, the royals are expecting a brand-new bouncing bubble of joy.

Here to join me is Victoria Arbiter.

Prince William also chose to keep things in perspective. There's a lot of world issues going on but obviously very exciting news for the young couple.

VICTORIA ARBITER, ROYAL EXPERT: It is exciting news. And to keep things in perspective, there's a lot of really severe news going on in the world right now and William is very conscious of that and it's nice to have this brief moment of joy.

PEREIRA: This is news of a baby. We know that last time around she was awfully sick with morning sickness in the early stages of her pregnancy. Any word if she's encountering that this time?

ARBITER: She is, which is why they broke the news today. Word has it she hasn't reached the crucial 12-week stage yet so any couple is not keen to release the news this early, especially on a global scale. She is being treated at home by doctors. That's where we saw Prince William. If she said Kate is at home with a cold, it's better to be upfront and honest from the beginning.

PEREIRA: Speaking of speculation, those that wanted to could say she was morning sick in this fashion and had a boy. Maybe that means that she's having a boy again? ARBITER: Possible. And, of course, the bookies are going to be crazy

with it. We've done this and know what to expect. Yes, it would be easy to assume she's having a boy. I'm hoping for historical reasons it's a girl this time around.

PEREIRA: I do, too, actually. I think you're summoning a baby girl.

(CROSSTALK)

PEREIRA: But to get to the business of being a royal, this does alter the secession plan a little bit, does it not?

ARBITER: Well, the beauty of George, when Kate was pregnant with George, the king altered the laws to succession. Had George been a little girl, she would have been usurped by younger-born brothers. We're talking about a spare this time around. Unless there's a catastrophic event, it's unlikely this baby will see the throne. But should this baby see the throne, who knows.

PEREIRA: Siblings always have that competition, but to be known as the spare in the royal family, I think would create all sorts of issues. Can you imagine the sibling rivalry?

ARBITER: It is pretty brutal.

PEREIRA: It is brutal.

ARBITER: You look at Harry who is making an incredible mark this week with marking the games this week. Yes, the spare sort of has a much looser approach to the royal family but there are still things that they have to be responsible for.

PEREIRA: And this is another royal to add to the family, to be sure.

ARBITER: Luckily for the queen, she's only got one great-grandson at the moment but this is her fifth great-grandchild.

PEREIRA: Victoria, thank you for joining me.

ARBITER: Thank you.

PEREIRA: Quickly, we want to add our congratulations to Neil Patrick Harris and his long-time partner, David Burka, who tied the knot in Italy. Their 3-year-old twins were part of the celebration and Elton John performed. Neil is joining us at this hour a week from Thursday. I'm sure John will have many questions, as will I. Our congratulations.

Thanks so much for joining us @THISHOUR.

"Legal View" with Ashleigh Banfield starts right now.