2009 White Party — Sterling parades rookie Blake Griffin

Blake Griffin recounts attending Donald Sterling's annual 'White Party' in Malibu shortly after the 2009 draft, where Sterling repeatedly walked Griffin through groups of guests, introduced him with a scripted line and positioned hired models next to Griffin for photographs and attention [15][16]. Griffin describes feeling objectified and awkward during the episode and says the behavior underscored a power imbalance between owner and player that he and others later referenced when evaluating Sterling's conduct. Contemporary reporting and later interviews with Griffin and profiles corroborate the event as a formative, first-hand anecdote that Griffin publicly related in his Players' Tribune essay and other interviews [15][16][18].

The White Party episode is important because it predates and personalizes the broader Sterling controversy: rather than an abstract complaint about ownership decisions, Griffin's account documents a specific interaction that shaped a player's perception of the owner. That personal recollection helps explain why Griffin's later public reactions to the April 2014 tapes were shaped by long-standing discomfort, and why his Players' Tribune essay resonated—it moved discussion from franchise policy to personal treatment of players [15][16][18].

Griffin kept the anecdote private for years but later published it in a first-person essay after Sterling's 2014 recorded remarks became public, using the episode to illustrate a pattern of behavior that made players uneasy [15][10]. The 2014 tapes and subsequent league action ended Sterling's ownership role, making the White Party anecdote a prelude rather than an ongoing source of public conflict between Griffin and Sterling once the team changed hands [3][9][15].