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Last month, as Portland Trail Blazers general manager Neil Olshey announced the hiring of head coach Chauncey Billups, he assured fans that the team had thoroughly investigated a 1997 rape allegation against Billups. “You are just going to have to take us at our word that we hired an experienced firm,” Olshey said.
The investigator in question appears to be Dave Hallman, a Roseburg-based private investigator and consultant who runs a security firm called the Adler Group and who the team has confirmed has been a contractor with the Blazers for 11 years.
On his website, Hallman lists his credentials as a former FBI agent in Dallas and Portland. The Athletic reported last month that the Blazers had contracted with a former FBI agent, and Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that Hallman had contacted Waltham, Mass., police about the 1997 accusation against Billups.
But questions about Hallman’s fitness to conduct a review of a sexual-assault accusation surfaced this week after OPB reported that the team’s inquiry did not contact Billups’ accuser. On Thursday, users of the online forum Reddit posted images from Hallman’s Twitter account, where he retweeted pornographic images as recently as April. (The account links to his business website.)
Hallman, 66, has locked his account and did not return phone calls from WW. But WW visited his account before it was locked, and has obtained many of the screenshots shared on Reddit.
On April 2, Hallman retweeted into his feed two GIFs, or short video clips, from a Twitter account called “Cuck helper (online).” Cuckold pornography consists of photos and videos intended to arouse men who have a fetish of their wives having sex with other men.
The two GIFs are both hardcore pornography depicting sex acts.
On the same account, Hallman shared tweets skeptical of transgender rights and proclaiming allegiance to the “Thin Blue Line” movement of police officers—not entirely surprising, given his law enforcement background, but politically charged for someone trusted to manage a sensitive investigation.
His retweeting of these images raises questions—not only about his own judgment, but about how closely the Blazers organization and Olshey monitored the investigator whose work they cited to reassure fans that the allegation against Billups had been thoroughly examined.
When WW asked the Trail Blazers today about the pornographic images, franchise spokesperson Ashley Clinkscale told WW that the organization is now aware of the posts and will no longer be using Hallman’s services. She did not say whether Hallman was the primary investigator for the Billups inquiry.
“Though the Trail Blazers have used the Adler Group for the past 11 years, we were recently made aware of inappropriate content on the personal twitter page of the principal of the Adler Group. The content of the Twitter page is completely unacceptable and is counter to what we stand for as an organization. As a result, we will no longer be using their services,” Clinkscale tells WW.
The firing of Adler Group comes amid widespread fan backlash to the hiring of Billups despite the allegation and the secrecy surrounding what vetting the team did of its new head coach. As some fans pledge to stop attending games, the furor has increased scrutiny into Olshey’s job security and whether the team’s star player, Damian Lillard, will seek a trade.