Dearica Hamby woke up Monday morning to a racist text message from a number she did not recognize. She posted a screenshot of it on X with four words: “Anyone know this number?”
The message came in at 6:25 a.m. from a 561 area code, which covers West Palm Beach and the surrounding part of South Florida. It called her a slur, said she should be put in a zoo, called her an animal, and included a monkey emoji.
She did not write a statement. She did not tag the league. She posted the screenshot with the number visible and let the internet do the rest. It took hours. Users ran the number through reverse lookup services and began circulating a name, along with public records listing a man in his forties in Lantana, Florida, roughly ten minutes from West Palm Beach. By Monday afternoon, people were reporting that his Facebook account was being scrubbed.
Baller Alert has not independently confirmed that the person being named is the sender. The identification came from users running public database searches, not from law enforcement, the WNBA, the Sparks, or the man himself.
What is confirmed: the message exists, Hamby posted it herself, and the number is visible in her screenshot. As of Monday afternoon there was no public response from the man being named, no confirmed police report, and no statement from the Sparks or the league.
Now here is the part that is not new.
The women of this league absorb this constantly, and it has gotten worse as the audience has grown. Chelsea Gray received a racist message on social media, and Hilton Grand Vacations fired the employee who sent it after determining it violated company policy. Angel Reese has been a target since college. Caitlin Clark’s arrival brought in a wave of new viewers, and a portion of them showed up hostile toward everybody, including her.
The harassment is not just online either. Since July 2025, people have thrown sex toys onto WNBA courts in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. The man arrested for the first one told police it was supposed to be a joke that would go viral. At a Liberty game, one of those objects hit a 12-year-old girl in the stands, and the man charged in that case is facing two counts of assault. Earlier this month at the Dream Sparks game, Angel Reese had to stop at the scorer’s table and point out which section it came from, on a night she went nine for nine.
Then there is the courtside heckling. Enes Kanter Freedom got walked out of a Fever Sky game this week after a confrontation with Natasha Cloud, having shown up in a shirt defining the word woman and joined a rally outside the arena first. He went on Fox News afterward.
None of this happens at NBA games. Nobody throws anything. Nobody organizes a rally about who is eligible to play. Nobody sends an NBA forward a monkey emoji at 6:25 in the morning and expects nothing to come of it.
Hamby has been through a public fight before and won it. She is a three time All-Star, a 2022 champion, and a Jordan Brand athlete, and she is the reason the league’s new collective bargaining agreement requires teams to get a player’s consent before trading her while pregnant. People call it the Dearica Hamby Rule. She fought for it after the Aces traded her while she was pregnant in 2023, which triggered a league investigation.
So she knows how this works. Publishing the message turns something meant to be anonymous into a public record with a phone number attached, and it moves the cost from the person who received it to the person who sent it.
Whoever sent that text sent it from a live number, unblocked, at 6:25 in the morning, to a professional athlete with a verified account and a large following. Whatever he thought was going to happen next, the screenshot was up before most people had finished their coffee.
