Ben Simmons Rumors

“I had a terrible year,” Simmons says, flatly, “so I know how to handle my emotions and what I need to be doing to get on track. If I’m worried or sad or frustrated or angry, I feel like I’m better able to deal with that now. It took time, but I’m at peace with who I am and what’s going on around me. I know what my priorities are, and what I need to do every day. Besides that, I just want to be me.”

That’s a reference to his sister Olivia, with whom he was close growing up, and who in early 2021 accused their half-brother Sean Tribe of molesting her as a child. Her tweets on the subject were denied by the family and later found to be defamatory. “I was the target, so I felt a responsibility to keep everything together,” says 36-year-old Tribe, Simmons’s manager since his days in Louisiana until last year. “But that affects me, therefore it affects Ben, because we’re family and I’m working with him every day.” With his professional and personal lives both shaken, Simmons was adrift. “These things just started piling up and piling up, and basketball was supposed to be my happy place, where I’m able to be free and express myself, and suddenly I wasn’t able to do that.” Before countless games he would call his sister Emily, who manages Simmons’s marketing and had, like Tribe, moved to the US to support him. He remembers once asking her a simple plaintive question: “Do you ever just wake up sad?”