by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.

When it comes to men playing in women’s sports, I have no dog in this fight. Although I do think men should be barred from competing against women in shooting sports, where the ladies hold an unfair advantage — on average, they concentrate and focus better than most of us.

Beyond that, it’s not my issue and it’s not my league. The WNBA is a private business that can set its own eligibility rules, enforce them, and live with the consequences at the box office. That’s how this is supposed to work. Nobody needs a statute, a special session, or an attorney general’s opinion to tell a basketball league who suits up.

But I do have opinions about judgment, and Friday night at Gainbridge Fieldhouse gave us a case study.

The Indiana Fever beat the Connecticut Sun 111-91. Nobody remembers that. What people remember is that Royce White, the former NBA first-round pick who has declared himself for the 2027 WNBA draft, showed up courtside in a long blonde wig. Fans lined up to shake his hand. And Attorney General Todd Rokita posed with him, along with activist Riley Gaines, and then put the photograph on his own X account, tagged White in it, and captioned it with a joke about the league’s eligibility rules.

Here is what the caption left out.

In February, a Hennepin County District Court judge in Minnesota entered an order for protection against White, finding him liable for domestic abuse against his ex-wife and their teenage son. Under Minnesota law that finding requires evidence of actual physical harm or the infliction of fear of imminent harm — it is not a paperwork formality. The court barred White from contacting his ex-wife for fifty years and the boy for two, and wrote that she appeared to be at a loss for how else to get any peace from him. It was the third such order she has obtained against him. The order is civil, not criminal, and White is appealing it, arguing the judge was biased and that he was not permitted to put on witnesses. He is entitled to that appeal and he may win it.

He is not entitled to have the rest of us pretend the order doesn’t exist. The Minnesota Republican Party didn’t. Its chairman publicly asked White to suspend his Senate campaign over it. White refused, and Republican primary voters up there finished the job on August 11, handing him eleven percent and a third-place trophy. He announced a presidential campaign the following week, because of course he did.

By Saturday morning, a national account had grabbed Rokita’s photo, put the words “Protect WOMEN at all costs” over it, and ridden it past 2.8 million views. The replies were what you would expect.

So, some questions for the Attorney General.

Did you know about the protective order before you posted the photo? If the answer is no, that’s understandable — it was a crowd, he was the story of the night, and everyone was getting a picture. But you posted it twice and tagged him. Somebody in that office has a phone.

Now that you do know, do you stand by it? Does the post stay up?

And the one I actually care about: you are the chief legal officer of this state and a licensed attorney. You know exactly what an order for protection is, what a petitioner has to prove to get one, and how hard it is for someone to walk into a courthouse and ask a stranger in a robe for protection from a person they used to live with. Three times, in this case. Does the woman on the other end of that Minnesota order get any consideration here, or does she lose out to a good photo?

I’d genuinely like to hear the answers, and I’ll print them.

Politics is a business of pictures, and every officeholder eventually takes one they wish they hadn’t. The tell isn’t the picture. It’s what they do the morning after somebody explains it to them.

Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of IndyPolitics.org and an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois. He has read a protective order or two in his day.