Former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom has claimed to have lost roughly $50 million in salaries and possible endorsements after his career ended abruptly when he spoke out against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The basketball player made the claims in a hearing on July 11 before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), which is chaired by both Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).
Tuesday’s hearing, titled “Corporate Complicity: Subsidizing the PRC’s Human Rights Violations,” centered on the alleged human rights abuses taking place in China, including genocide, forced organ harvesting, forced labor, internet censorship, and mass surveillance.
It also focused on how international businesses and corporations that seek to operate in China or maintain access to the Chinese market often find themselves at risk of being complicit in such human rights abuses.
“According to my manager, I lost around $50 million dollars, with all the NBA contracts and endorsement deals that I could’ve signed,” the sportsman said.
“I sleep in peace at night knowing that I did the right thing. My only question is: How can the biggest dictatorship in the world, China, control an 100 percent American-made company and fire an American citizen?” he added.
China’s ‘Brutal Dictator’
During Tuesday’s hearing, Mr. Kanter told lawmakers that he has, over the past 11 years, often spoken out about the human rights violations in his home country of Turkey, where he said there were “many innocent people being prosecuted” by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s regime, including his own relatives.
He later moved into activism toward China following a “simple basketball camp” in New York, during which he was asked by the parent of one child why he had not spoken out about the CCP’s alleged abuses against members of the Uyghur and other Muslim minority groups.
A 2022 report published by the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR) found a number of “serious human rights violations” may have been committed against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, China. The United States has also accused the CCP of genocide. China has repeatedly dismissed the claims as a smear campaign.
Mr. Kanter told lawmakers that after being questioned by the parent, he began researching the CCP’s alleged human rights abuses against members of the Uyghur group and others, at one point speaking to a concentration camp survivor who detailed her experience of torture, gang rape, forced sterilization, and abortion methods in such camps.
