The Garden is off thin ice after agreeing to settle a sexual-harassment lawsuit by a former captain of the Ranger City Skaters cheerleaders.
Courtney Prince, 29, dropped her suit depicting Madison Square Garden as a hotbed of sexual discrimination in exchange for a confidential sum, ending a three-year legal battle.
“We resolved this with no admission of wrongdoing on the part of either party and will have no further comment,” Prince said in a statement.
The deal came just two weeks after fired Knick executive Anucha Browne Sanders bagged an $11.5 million settlement in her case against coach Isiah Thomas and Garden Chairman James Dolan, who were both forced to testify before a jury.
Prince’s lawyer, Kathleen Peratis, would not say last night how much her client will receive.
Had the trial in the Prince case been held – likely early next year – it would have further scarred the Garden’s already sullied reputation.
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Prince claims she was subjected to constant come-ons, including an incident in a Greenwich Village bar where a Ranger executive allegedly tried to force himself on her and pressured her to join a threesome with a newspaper reporter.
She also accused Garden officials of quizzing her about the sex lives of other on-ice cheerleaders and ordering her to arrange meetings with the skaters in bars.
Prince claims she was forced to make skaters pad their bras, take diet pills and manipulate their looks to look more “f- – -able.”
When she warned skaters to stay away from certain raunchy Rangers employees, she was fired, according to the lawsuit.
During a federal trial in the Sanders case, lawyers for the fired vice president of marketing claimed that Ranger executives kept a book of sexual positions they wanted to try with skaters.
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Sanders claimed she had learned about the book from one of her staff members, but the judge in that case kept the testimony away from the jury because it did not involve the Knicks.
Additional reporting by Ed Robinson