UPDATE (Sept. 3): An announcement today reveals that a new pregnancy test requested by Dirk Nowitzki and ordered by a Texas judge in late July has been administered, apparently in Missouri. It shows that his ex-fiancée is not currently pregnant. Cristal Taylor was first tested -- by jail officials -- when she was booked in Dallas on May 6th. Those medical results, with virtually 100% accurate lab work by the county hospital, were officially released in late May. At that time, she tested positive for pregnancy. No word on when, precisely, a miscarriage was suffered during the ensuing months of incarceration.
Original Entry:
The saga of the superstar athlete and his fallen angel enters its dénouement phase.
The climax, of course, came in early May. That's when police arrested Cristal Taylor at the home of Dallas Mavericks basketball player Dirk Nowitzki. She'd lived with him for over a year, and he'd presented her with a $200,000 engagement ring this past New Year's Eve.
Don't worry, he could afford it on his $18 million annual salary.
His private investigation, in advance of signing a prenuptial agreement, ended the domestic bliss. Many years earlier, she'd skipped out on probation from Missouri (for forgery), and then ran up a $10,000 dental bill on a credit card in Texas. Despite other pre-Dirk gossip, that's the formal extent of her crime spree that apparently ended nine years ago.
The cops nabbed her while Nowitzki and his team were conveniently out of town during the playoffs, and she's been in jail ever since.
Ah, but it turned out he wasn't exactly unaware of her past. It also turned out she was pregnant, although his attorney initially denied it. Nonetheless, Nowitzki immediately split for his native Germany, where he's remained all summer. From afar, he's asked for DNA tests, promising to seek custody upon confirmation.
If there's indeed a junior Dirkster or Dirkalina in his near future, the offspring has spent most of its fetal development in a ten foot cell, subsisting on prison food and female stress hormone.
Meanwhile, the Ken Lay's and Bernie Madoff's of this world steal billions, and are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise in advance of their trials.
The latest news: the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Monday that Taylor has been sentenced to five years in Missouri for her failure to continue reporting to a parole officer after moving to Texas. She'd already made financial restitution, and pleaded with the judge for mercy in a four page, hand-written letter, to no avail. The $10,000 dental bill in Texas awaits.
Nowitzki should have handled this differently. Yes, she has a felonious background and wasn't straight with him about it. Still, this wasn't a mere summer fling. Serious romance involving adults in their 30's usually has more than one moving part.
The fact is this seven-footer moved Taylor into his mansion to be his personal concubine, to cook for him, do his laundry, share his bed. He topped it off by getting engaged to marry her.
She'd found her meal ticket, and there's no hint or allegation she did less than right by him.
Even in choosing to ultimately wash his hands of her, Nowitzki should have at least gotten a decent lawyer to contact the court and set up her arraignment. This happens every day on matters far more serious, so it wasn't necessary to orchestrate her very public midday arrest.
The eighteen million dollar man dumped her as a ward of the state, after first knocking her up.
His fans think he owed her nothing, that his approach was the fashionable thing to do. A prior comment on Huffington Post read, "If she were {already} his wife and he just found out about her past, I wouldn't fault him for leaving her there." As if a wife -- or a pregnant fiancée -- were nothing more than chattel. (FYI: If Taylor were already his wife, she'd be entitled to the best legal representation their money could buy.)
Comments on sports blogs have trashed her as a skank and a ho. Her mug shot came in for ridicule, too. It seems she didn't look good enough in an orange jumpsuit and no makeup.
Whenever news breaks about a sports hero and a golddigger, we side with the hero. Yet plenty of men and women in polite society hook someone rich through wile and guile. The difference is that we have business dealings with those people, and blow them air kisses at cocktail parties.
Cristal Taylor surely knew the day would come when the piper must be paid. By the time it arrived, Dirk Nowitzki was too involved with her not to help. It's one thing to end a relationship, something else entirely to throw the other person under a bus, along with your unborn child.
She's no angel, but he's no prince. Maybe they're perfect for each other, after all.
This blog entry was mainly about a celeb's behavior toward his fiancée when her past caught up to her. The pregnancy was one aspect, although many commenters have focused on it exclusively.
A repeated assertion is that she wasn't tested for pregnancy when arrested in early May. Another is that the result of this testing was never released.
In fact, she signed a waiver (required by federal law), and the results were released in late May. She was tested by jail officials -- in jail, mind you, with all personal possessions removed -- and the testing was positive for pregnancy. Confirmation of this was provided by a local county hospital. Contemporaneous news coverage was quite clear:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/spt/stories/052709dnspocristal.1cdd59f2.html
As noted elsewhere, even over-the-counter test kits have a 97-99% accuracy rate. Professional testing, like she got, has a virtual 100% accuracy rate.
So, the only empirical evidence is that she was pregnant when arrested. Nothing says otherwise.
That remained the last official word on the subject until September 3rd, when the result of another test, administered several months later, showed that she wasn't pregnant at the time of the new testing.
In other words, she was pregnant before she wasn't.
It's time to stop beating a dead horse.
"The judge issued the order for the test on July 24th and then "sealed" the proceeding,
Huh? The judges order was reported three days later by ESPN. Some seal. And why on earth would she or her attorney want to wrangle over taking another pregnancy test? She was so anxious to take the one in Dallas, after all.
Which brings me to my comment on the faked pregnancy test. As was stated earlier there are a number of reasons she could have produced one false positive pregnancy test in May and some of them could have been self induced. I would never think of suggesting that your average Jane had faked a pregnancy test. But we aren't talking about Neil Armstrong here. We're talking about a convicted CONWOMAN which is something you seem so ready to forget.
Now, getting back to the sentencing and letter for leniency. You stated that the judge set a precedent for not caring about her pregnancy when she denied her bail reduction on July 6. That's why she didn't bring up her pregnancy in at her sentencing, right? Why then did her lawyer continue to argue that Taylor needed outside medical attention on July 24, when the pregnancy test was ordered? If the precedent was set on July 6 and sentencing was on August 24, why did the lawyer continue to argue that Taylor was pregnant three weeks after the precedent?
The only info that was to be allowed out was what the judge chose, in other words, and the only thing the judge allowed out was that the court had ordered an additional test.
This doesn't mean the media (such as ESPN) couldn't report about it three days later! Good grief.
Uh, doubt it. How many pregnant 37 year old inmates have you met? If she was indeed pregnant, she would have doctors available to her should anything come up that is a cause for concern and she would be examined if something went wrong. If she was miscarrying, she would probably start bleeding and cramping, neither of which is normal and a doctor would have been alerted to be sure everything was fine. That is when the miscarriage would have been discovered. I don't buy that there is no record of miscarriage. Does she not get regular monthly screening like any other woman? Does she not see a doctor? If she does, the doctor would most likely have made note of it in her medical file. If for some reason Taylor miscarried and had no symptoms, though this is doubtful at this stage of pregnancy, I'm sure they would still have noted this and attorney would have been made aware. You make it sound as if she was sitting alone in a cold corner miscarrying...that is ridiculous.
In my 30 years in politics, I've worked with elected officials and probably toured more county jails, state jails, and death row units than I care to remember! I've met more than my share of pregnant inmates, and I have more than a passing acquaintance with how these facilities operate, particularly the less savory ones. It ain't that pretty at all.
Regardless of that, your disagreement seems to be with Taylor's Missouri attorney, who said this: "Any comment I ever made about her pregnancy or any miscarriages would have been based on medical records that I had from Dallas County, as I would never take a client's word for anything. Is it possible that she miscarried in the St. Charles County jail? Yes. However, I do not have medical records to indicate either way on that. Nor do I know whether there would even be medical records if she miscarried."
Given your expertise, I suggest you contact his Missouri office and take it up with him.
It would have no impact with that judge. After all, Taylor's Missouri lawyer used pregnancy during her FIRST bail reduction hearing on July 7, and it didn't work then. The judge told the lawyer that she wasn't casting doubt on the pregnancy claim, but added "it is my understanding these (health screening reports) are self-reported by an inmate."
The local judge from another state was wrong, of course, not unheard of. Taylor's Texas pregnancy test wasn't "self reported." It was administered by jail officials, and "labbed" by the county hospital. But the point is that the Missouri judge was clearly signaling a lack of sympathy to the pregnancy argument as an excuse for leniency.
FYI, after the results of the Sept. 3 test were released, Taylor's Missouri lawyer said this: "Any comment I ever made about her pregnancy or any miscarriages would have been based on medical records that I had from Dallas County, as I would never take a client's word for anything. Is it possible that she miscarried in the St. Charles County jail? Yes. However, I do not have medical records to indicate either way on that. Nor do I know whether there would even be medical records if she miscarried."
A 37 year old inmate gets tested in the light of day, but usually miscarries alone in the dark, or in the bathroom. Well, duh.
The only reasonable explanation I can see for not including her pregnancy in a four page letter is because of the fact that she does not appear to play a big part in the lives of her current children and therefore wouldn't fool anyone as mother of the year.
Um, are you aware that Dirk Nowitzki returns to Germany every offseason and that all this went down just as the season was ending?
"No word yet on when, precisely, she suffered a miscarriage during the past four months of incarceration."
Do you always pull facts out of thin air and print them as fact? Are you aware that even her attorney doesn't even know if she was ever pregnant? Don't you think that the attorney, had these records you keep talking about been so credible, would be able to refer back to them in this case when presented with the news that she is not pregnant at this point in time? Wouldn't he have a copy of the papers in his possession or at least evidence (that little link you keep providing) that they in fact prove she was pregnant? And yet, he seems unsure whether or not his own client was telling the truth...hmmmm.
To be clear, this is a very real possibility but I am not stating it as an absolute, the way the author does for his possibilities. I would just like this article and the comments of the author to reflect all possible explanations rather than picking one and stating it as fact.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,632393,00.html
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/spt/basketball/mavs/stories/062609dnspodirklede.63bcfbd.html
These two articles (especially the one in the SPIEGEL could have explained a lot to you, where you just assumed the opposite of reality) make very clear that Nowitzki didn't know much of her criminal past, instead he knew her under a wrong name as she introduced herself to him as Christian Trevino from Brazil.
That's something another user tried to explain to you even before me, but you just responded:
"We're all entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts.
You can't take the previously reported nugget of information that she's used an alias in the past and turn that into "Dirk didn't even know her name.""
"We're all entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts."?! Well, well...
You wrote "Many people confirm that Nowitzki knew her past....everyone knew her past! Since it was such common knowledge..."
I really want to know where you got that from! And don't come up with the "my little jailbird"-quote directly from C.T.'s camp again (I assume you’re only talking about her criminal record since you’ve shown not to care about her history as a con woman, gold digger and mother of the three children she abandoned at all - even you can't suppose Dirk wanted to marry a woman with a history like that!). Here is what I found (after I advised you to bring it up on your own to reserve a little credibility, but you decided to leave it alone and rather pretended you didn't see my direct response to one of your comments):
The Dallas Morning News reported that family court Associate Judge Randall Grubbs ordered the tests on Cristal Taylor, who claims Nowitzki is the father of her unborn child.
"We know the first one has to happen," Grubbs said during a hearing on Friday, according to the Morning News. "The other one may be moot."
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=4355430
why would a judge state "the other may be moot"
Mr. Jackson owes an apology
Answer: The previous pregnancy test was May 8th, when Taylor was in the Dallas jail. She ultimately signed a waiver allowing the medical records of that testing to be released to a newspaper. The paper got them and wrote a story in late May revealing that she'd been tested by jail officials, and that the local hospital (Parkland) had confirmed a positive result.
By July 24th, when a family court judge in Texas (Grubbs) ordered an additional pregnancy test, it had been almost two months since the prior testing. Things change. Ergo, the judge required more recent data before moving forward with Nowitzki's custody claim. That's why the judge said that a paternity test -- after the pregnancy test -- "may be moot." A perfectly reasonable statement by the judge.
There's a presumption by many commenters that a woman who tests positive for pregnancy in May, but who tests negative after several months in jail, was therefore not pregnant in May.
As I've noted elsewhere, even over-the-counter home pregnancy tests have a 97-99% accuracy rate. Professional testing, such as that administered by the jail (lab work by Parkland Hospital), has a virtually 100% accuracy rate.
Since the medical odds of the May testing being wrong are astronomically against, one is left with the empirical evidence that Nowitzki's ex-fiancée was pregnant before she wasn't.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/spt/stories/052709dnspocristal.1cdd59f2.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johnny-benjamin/nba-star-dirk-nowitzki-is_b_277275.html
The author is someone who has actually been involved in the Professional Sports world and written about it. Not just some guy with a penchant for conspiracy theories and an unwillingness to face facts as they develop.