Clemens sues ex-trainer over doping claims

HOUSTON – Roger Clemens has filed suit against his former strength coach, charging Brian McNamee with making “absolutely false and defamatory” statements by claiming he injected Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone.

The suit portrays McNamee as an unreliable witness and alleges that the Mitchell Report on performance-enhancing drug use in Major League Baseball presented McNamee’s claims as “uncorroborated evidence.” The suit also alleges that McNamee initially denied to federal investigators that Clemens used steroids and HGH, then changed his story under interrogation.

The suit also alleges that McNamee lied in an unrelated Florida police investigation in 2001.

McNamee is the only defendant named in the suit, filed late Sunday in Clemens’ hometown of Houston. Clemens asks for a jury trial and seeks unspecified financial damages as well as a court declaration that he has not defamed McNamee.

Earl Ward, McNamee’s lawyer, has said his client would consider a defamation suit against Clemens.

Clemens is scheduled to hold a news conference today in Houston. He and McNamee are expected to testify under oath before Congress next week.

Clemens and McNamee spoke by telephone Friday. It is uncertain whether Clemens asked McNamee to retract his statements or face a lawsuit, or whether the result of that conversation prompted the filing nearly a month after former Sen. George Mitchell issued his report.

“We kept thinking McNamee might change his mind and come to his senses and admit he was lying,” Clemens’ attorney Rusty Hardin told the Houston Chronicle.

According to the suit, federal investigators contacted McNamee last summer and told him they had evidence of his involvement in drug trafficking and could face prison time. The suit claims McNamee told other people – without specifying who – that he had “repeatedly denied” to investigators during an initial interrogation that Clemens “had used steroids or HGH” while playing for the Toronto Blue Jays and New York Yankees.

In another interrogation the next day, the suit claims, after assistant U.S. Atty. Matthew Parrella reminded McNamee he could face jail time if he lied to a federal agent and then redirected the conversation to Clemens, lead BALCO investigator Jeff Novitzky “went on this big tirade.”

The suit attributes this information to a McNamee quote but does not provide the source of the quote. The Houston Chronicle reported that Hardin’s investigators had spoken with McNamee since the Mitchell Report was released.

In recapping the interrogation, McNamee allegedly said Novitzky told him that “I must not be good at what I do, because I stretch him and I train him, so if I put my hands on his body, how can I not know that his body’s changing by taking steroids?”

Then, “and for the first time in his life,” the suit claims, McNamee said Clemens used steroids and HGH. After this “recantation,” the suit alleges, McNamee repeated those claims to federal investigators and to Mitchell’s investigators so as to remain a “witness” in the federal case rather than a “target” of prosecution.

“According to what McNamee told others,” the suit claims, “his Mitchell Commission interview was conducted like a cold war era interrogation, in which a federal agent merely read to the Mitchell investigators McNamee’s previously obtained statement and then asked McNamee to confirm what he previously stated.”

The suit also alleges that McNamee, as a rape suspect in Florida in 2001, “lied to police officers and refused their requests for evidence in a situation where he denied any wrongdoing.” The New York Times has reported that no charges were filed in that case, but the suit claims and the newspaper reported that McNamee was fired by the Yankees after the incident.

bill.shaikin@latimes.com