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A Chicago man allegedly told authorities he opened fire on an unmarked car carrying a police officer and two ATF agents early Wednesday because he thought they were “opps” — or rival street gang members — surveilling a neighborhood on the Southwest Side.

Now Eugene “Gen Gen” McLaurin, 28, faces federal charges in connection with the shooting that wounded the officer and two agents Wednesday morning just ahead of a visit by President Joe Biden to the Chicago area.

McLaurin is charged with one count of using a dangerous and deadly weapon to assault an ATF special agent. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. During a brief court appearance before U.S. Magistrate Judge Heather McShain, a prosecutor said the feds want McLaurin held in custody as a danger to the community.

A defense attorney for McLaurin waived a detention hearing for the time being, meaning McLaurin will stay in federal custody. Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Pozolo said McLaurin was initially arrested by Chicago police at 8:35 a.m. Wednesday, and he was transferred to federal custody at 11:03 a.m. Thursday.

The shooting happened just before 6 a.m. Wednesday as the officer and two agents were getting onto the northbound lanes of Interstate 57 near 119th Street, about a mile from the Morgan Park police station, authorities said.

The police officer was grazed in the back of the head, one ATF agent was shot in the hand, and another ATF agent suffered a wound to his side, police said. All were taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center.

Ald. Matt O’Shea (19th) made an appeal to Biden after the shooting, saying, “We’re at a critical point in the city of Chicago. We need help. Police can’t do it alone.” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Biden had expressed his personal support for the officer and agents during a meeting with Mayor Lori Lightfoot on the tarmac at O’Hare Airport.

McLaurin is a convicted felon who was previously sentenced to five years in prison in 2015 for illegal gun possession and delivery of methamphetamine, and one year in prison in 2013 for illegal gun possession, court records show.

A seven-page criminal complaint filed Thursday against McLaurin says the officer and agents were working on an undercover investigation near the 400 block of West 118th around 5:45 a.m. Then, a white Chevrolet Malibu began to follow an unmarked Chrysler 300 in which the officer and two agents were riding.

The complaint identifies the Chicago police officer as an ATF task force officer.

The Malibu followed the Chrysler as it traveled west on 119th, according to the complaint. At one point, it said the Malibu pulled ahead of the Chrysler, parked, then began to follow the Chrysler again after it drove by.

The Chrysler turned north on Ashland to get onto I-57, and the officers inside the Chrysler took down the license plate number for the Malibu. Then, when the Chrysler reached the I-57 on-ramp, the officers inside saw the Malibu on Ashland Avenue.

That’s when the driver’s side window of the Malibu rolled down, and a Black male with a “twist hair style” pointed a black handgun at the officers and opened fire, according to the complaint.

Authorities later tracked the Malibu to a house in the 200 block of East 89th Street, according to the complaint. There, officers found two Hornady 9mm shell casings on the driver’s side of car. Three such casings were also found at the scene of the shooting, according to the complaint.

A Chicago police officer also saw someone with a hairstyle matching the shooter’s in the backyard of a house next door to where the Malibu was parked, authorities said. Officers knocked on the door at 7:15 a.m., and McLaurin eventually stepped out.

McLaurin was sweaty and “visibly nervous,” according to the complaint. He allegedly told authorities he had been with his girlfriend that morning and had just been dropped off. An ATF agent took his picture and texted it to one of the victims of the shooting, authorities said. The victim allegedly said McLaurin’s hair matched the shooter’s but couldn’t say definitively it was him.

However, authorities arrested McLaurin and questioned him at a police station, according to the complaint. There, McLaurin allegedly admitted he was driving the Malibu near 118th and Normal early Wednesday, and that he began following the Chrysler.

McLaurin allegedly explained that a friend told him Tuesday that a white Chrysler 300 had been seen surveilling the area, and he thought the car he found was being driven by “opps” — or members of a rival street gang.

The feds say McLaurin admitted opening fire on the Chrysler with a Glock 9mm that he had purchased for personal protection a few months earlier, and he said he later dropped the gun into a drain.

Authorities said they found a key to the Malibu in a dryer vent tube during a search of the home where McLaurin was found.

Contributing: Lynn Sweet

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NEW YORK — Lawyers for R&B singer R. Kelly were granted a little more time Thursday to prepare his defense for his upcoming sex-trafficking trial in New York City.

At a hearing in federal court in Brooklyn, U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly said jury selection would go forward on Aug. 9 as originally planned but agreed to delay opening statements until Aug. 18 rather than start the openings right after the panel is picked.

The jailed Kelly switched legal teams less than a month ago. His new attorneys had asked a judge Monday to postpone the New York trial for a longer period, saying they couldn’t adequately prepare.

The lawyers said they had been unable to meet with him in person while he was quarantined for 14 days in a Brooklyn federal jail after being brought there from a Chicago lockup on June 22. Federal jails have been quarantining transferred and newly incarcerated inmates since early in the COVID-19 pandemic.

The legal team also asked Thursday that Kelly be released on bail so he could better assist in his defense — a request the judge quickly denied. She assured them that they could now see Kelly in person at the jail seven days a week if they wanted.

“You’re going to have full access to Mr. Kelly,” she said.

Kelly, 54, was making his first in-person appearance in a New York court since his transfer. He didn’t speak, except to exchange greetings with the judge.

The Grammy-winning, multiplatinum-selling R&B singer is charged with leading an enterprise of managers, bodyguards and other employees who helped him recruit women and girls for sex. Federal prosecutors say the group selected victims at concerts and other venues and arranged for them to travel to see Kelly.

The case is only part of the legal peril facing the singer, born Robert Sylvester Kelly. He also has pleaded not guilty to sex-related charges in Illinois and Minnesota.

He denies ever abusing anyone.

Kelly won multiple Grammys for “I Believe I Can Fly,” a 1996 song that became an inspirational anthem played at school graduations, weddings, advertisements and elsewhere.

Nearly a decade later, he began releasing what eventually became 22 musical chapters of “Trapped in the Closet,” a drama that spins a tale of sexual deceit and became a cult classic.

But Kelly has been trailed for decades by complaints and allegations about his sexual behavior, including a 2002 child pornography case in Chicago. He was acquitted in that case in 2008.

Scrutiny intensified again amid the #MeToo movement in recent years, with multiple women going public with accusations against the singer. The pressure intensified with the release of the Lifetime documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” in 2019.

Criminal charges soon followed.

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ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro was on a roll. He repaired a fractured relationship with the NFL, securing a deal that will bring two Super Bowls to ABC. He brought the NHL back to ESPN and nabbed the rights to the SEC game of the week from CBS. From a business standpoint, his tenure largely has been a success.

But behind it all, according to reports, is a workplace environment that’s failing its employees.

This week, the New York Times revealed comments made last year by Rachel Nichols, who is white, when she learned that Maria Taylor, who is Black, would host ESPN’s studio show for the 2020 NBA Finals at Walt Disney World. Video of Nichols’ conversation, held in her hotel room, was recorded accidentally. It became available to employees through an ESPN sever and was obtained by the Times.

Said Nichols: “I wish Maria Taylor all the success in the world — she covers football, she covers basketball. If you need to give her more things to do because you are feeling pressure about your crappy longtime record on diversity — which, by the way, I know personally from the female side of it — like, go for it. Just find it somewhere else. You are not going to find it from me or taking my thing away.”

Nichols said that July 13, according to the Times, and ESPN still allowed her to work the Finals the next month as the sideline reporter. She was supposed to handle the same job at the Finals this season, but after her comments became public, ESPN replaced her with Malika Andrews, who is Black. Nichols still is hosting her daily NBA show, “The Jump,” though it was pulled Tuesday without explanation.

Nichols, a former Sun-Times intern, apologized to Taylor on the air Monday, and she told the New York Times that she has tried to apologize through calls and texts. Taylor hasn’t responded. And because ESPN couldn’t bring them together in 12 months, the network’s missteps overshadowed the Finals before they began. Even NBA commissioner Adam Silver seemed amazed by the network’s failure.

“When people can’t get in a room and talk through these issues, this seemingly has fostered now for a full year,” said Silver, who’ll be negotiating a new broadcast deal with ESPN before the current one expires in 2025. “I would have thought that in the past year, maybe through some incredibly difficult conversations, that ESPN would have found a way to be able to work through it. Obviously not.”

ESPN’s mishandling has gone beyond letting feelings fester. According to the Times, it broke contractual and verbal agreements. Nichols, 47, said last year that hosting the Finals show is part of her deal. Taylor, 34, said she’d host then only if Nichols didn’t appear, but ESPN reneged. The only known person ESPN punished is the producer who sent the video to Taylor. She was suspended two weeks without pay.

Taylor must be wondering why she finds herself in these situations. In September, former 670 The Score host Dan McNeil targeted Taylor for her fashion sense while working a “Monday Night Football” game. Tweeted McNeil: “NFL sideline reporter or a host for the AVN [Adult Video News] annual awards presentation?” The Score fired him the next day.

That isn’t to say Nichols should be fired. But while she believed her conversation was private, she said what she said. It provided the public a window into a company where egos are big, tensions are high and race is an issue. The Times’ story noted an email Taylor sent to ESPN brass, including Pitaro, that said, “Simply being a front facing black woman at this company has taken its toll physically and mentally.”

Nichols has been a staple of ESPN’s coverage of the NBA since returning to the network in 2016, when she began hosting “The Jump,” which she created. It’s a quality show, and Nichols has established relationships within the league that have led to noteworthy interviews. But this episode will haunt her.

Taylor is a rising star, as evidenced by her expanding portfolio of events. But her contract expires July 20, and the sides are far apart on salary, according to reports. Though ESPN has no problem spending on broadcast rights, it has tightened its spending on broadcasters, and some big names have left.

With the clock ticking on Taylor’s tenure, she might be next. Nichols might not be far behind. And ESPN only has itself to blame.

Remote patrol

• The New York Post reported that Sinclair Broadcast Group, which jointly owns Marquee Sports Network with the Cubs, made a bid for NBC Sports Regional Networks, which include NBC Sports Chicago. Sinclair already owns 19 RSNs, rebranded this year from Fox Sports to Bally Sports, which cover 42 pro teams (MLB, NBA and NHL). NBC also has RSNs in the coveted markets of Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, and it owns a piece of the Mets’ SNY.
• Former Bears linebacker Sam Acho signed a multiyear deal with ESPN to serve primarily as a lead studio analyst for college football on Saturdays on ESPN2. He also will call select college games and appear on ESPN programs as a college and NFL analyst.
• Just wondering: When Chris Myers fills in on Marquee, why does he pronounce Jon Sciambi’s name differently than Sciambi does?

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A Chicago man has been charged in federal court in connection with Wednesday’s shooting of a Chicago police officer and two federal agents.

Eugene McLaurin, 28, of Chicago, is charged with one count of using a dangerous and deadly weapon to assault an ATF agent. He faces up to 20 years in prison.

McLaurin appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Heather McShain on Thursday afternoon, where a prosecutor said he had been taken into federal custody at 11:03 a.m. following his arrest Wednesday by Chicago police.

Chicago police

Prosecutors told the judge they would seek to keep McLaurin detained in federal custody. McLaurin’s defense attorney waived a detention hearing for now, meaning McLaurin will stay in custody for the time being.

The shooting happened shortly before 6 a.m. as the officer and agents were getting onto the northbound lanes of Interstate 57 near 119th Street, about a mile form the Morgan Park police station.

The police officer was grazed in the back of the head, one ATF agent was shot in the hand, and another ATF agent suffered a wound to his side, police said. All were taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center.

McLaurin admitted that he began following a vehicle in which the officer and agents were riding Wednesday because he thought it was driven by “opps,” or rival street gang members, according to a seven-page criminal complaint.

He said he opened fire with a Glock 9mm pistol and later dropped the weapon in a drain, according to the complaint.

This is a developing story.

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NEW YORK — Michael Avenatti, the brash California lawyer who once represented Stormy Daniels in lawsuits against President Donald Trump, was sentenced Thursday to 2 1/2 years in prison for trying to extort up to $25 million from Nike by threatening the company with bad publicity.

Avenatti, 50, was convicted last year of charges including attempted extortion and honest services fraud in connection with his representation of a Los Angeles youth basketball league organizer who was upset that Nike had ended its league sponsorship.

U.S. District Judge Paul G. Gardephe called Avenatti’s conduct “outrageous,” saying he “hijacked his client’s claims, and he used those claims to further his own agenda, which was to extort millions of dollars from Nike for himself.”

Avenatti, the judge added, “had become drunk on the power of his platform, or what he perceived the power of his platform to be. He had become someone who operated as if the laws and the rules that applied to everyone else didn’t apply to him.”

Criminal fraud charges on two coasts disrupted Avenatti’s rapid ascent to fame. He also faces the start of a fraud trial next week in the Los Angeles area, a second California criminal trial later this year and a separate trial next year in Manhattan, where he is charged with cheating Daniels out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Avenatti represented Daniels in 2018 in lawsuits against Trump, appearing often on cable news programs to disparage the Republican president. Avenatti explored running against Trump in 2020, boasting that he would “have no problem raising money.” Daniels said a tryst with Trump a decade earlier resulted in her being paid $130,000 by Trump’s personal lawyer in 2016 to stay silent. Trump denied the affair.

Those political aspirations evaporated when prosecutors in California and New York charged Avenatti with fraud in March 2019. California prosecutors said he was enjoying a $200,000-a-month lifestyle while cheating clients out of millions of dollars and failing to pay hundreds of thousands to the Internal Revenue Service.

Charges alleging he cheated Daniels out of proceeds from a book deal followed weeks later. Avenatti pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Prosecutors requested a “very substantial” sentence, citing the U.S. Probation Department’s recommendation of an eight-year prison term. Avenatti’s lawyers said six months in prison and a year of home detention was enough punishment.

On Tuesday, the judge rejected a request by Avenatti’s lawyers to toss out his conviction in the Nike case on attempted extortion and honest services wire fraud charges. The judge wrote that evidence showed that Avenatti “devised an approach to Nike that was designed to enrich himself” rather than address his client’s objectives.

In written sentencing arguments, prosecutors said Avenatti tried to enrich himself by “weaponizing his public profile” to try to force Nike to submit to his demands.

In a victim-impact statement, Nike’s lawyers said Avenatti did considerable harm to the company by falsely trying to link it to a scandal in which bribes were paid to the families of NBA-bound college basketball players to steer them to powerhouse programs. An employee of Adidas, a Nike competitor, was convicted in that prosecution.

The lawyers said Avenatti threatened to do billions of dollars of damage to Nike and then falsely tweeted that criminal conduct at Nike reached the “highest levels.”

Avenatti’s former client, Gary Franklin Jr., said in a statement submitted by prosecutors that Avenatti’s action had “devastated me financially, professionally, and emotionally.” Franklin was expected in court Thursday.

In their presentence submission, Avenatti’s lawyers said their client had suffered enough, citing enormous public shame and a difficult stint in jail last year that ended after lawyers said he was particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus.

“Avenatti’s epic fall and public shaming has played out in front of the entire world. The Court may take judicial notice of this fact, as Avenatti’s cataclysmic fall has been well-documented,” the lawyers wrote.

Although prosecutors asked Gardephe to impose a $1 million restitution order to help cover Nike’s legal expenses, Avenatti’s attorneys cited the lack of financial losses as a reason for leniency.

“There was no financial loss to any victims so there is no restitution in this case,” they wrote. “The fact that a white collar federal criminal case was brought despite this fact is itself an important mitigating factor.”

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A grizzly bear pulled a woman from her tent in a small Montana town in the middle of the night and killed her before fellow campers could use bear spray to force the bruin out of the area.

Leah Davis Lokan, 65, a registered nurse from Chico, California, was on a long-distance bicycling trip and had stopped in the western Montana town of Ovando when she was killed early Tuesday, according to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials.

It was the bear’s second visit to the site where Lokan and two fellow bicyclists were camping near the post office, officials said.

The approximately 400-pound grizzly first awakened the campers around 3 a.m. They took food out of their tents, secured it and went back to sleep.

Surveillance video from a business in town showed the bear about a block from the post office about 15 minutes later, wildlife officials said.

Around 4:15 a.m., the sheriff’s office got a 911 call after two people in a tent near the victim’s tent were awakened by sounds of the attack, Powell County Sheriff Gavin Roselles said. They discharged their bear spray, and the bear ran away.

The bear is also believed to have entered a chicken coop in town that night, killing and eating several chickens.

Officials searched by helicopter for the grizzly but couldn’t find it.

“At this point, our best chance for catching this bear will be culvert traps set in the area near the chicken coop where the bear killed and ate several chickens,” said Randy Arnold, the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks regional supervisor in Missoula.

If found, the bear will be killed, said Greg Lemon, a spokesman for the state agency.

Investigators said they have obtained the bear’s DNA from the scene of the attack and will be able to compare it with any bear they are able to trap.

Lokan, who had worked at a hospital in Chico, had looked forward to the Montana bike trip for months, said Mary Flowers, a friend from Chico. Lokan had taken previous long-distance bike trips andwas accompanied by her sister and a friend, Flowers said.

“She loved these kind of adventures,” Flowers said. “A woman in her 60s, and she’s doing this kind of stuff. She had a passion for life that was out of the ordinary.”

Grizzly bears have run into increasing conflict with humans in the Northern Rockies over the past decade as the federally protected animals expanded into new areas and the number of people living and looking for recreation in the region grew. That has spurred calls from elected officials in Montana and neighboring Wyoming and Idaho to lift protections so the animals could be hunted.

Ovando, about 60 miles northwest of Helena, is a community of fewer than 100 people at the edge of the sprawling Bob Marshall wilderness. North of Ovando lies an expanse of forests and mountains, including Glacier National Park that stretches to Canada and is home to an estimated 1,000 grizzlies. It’s the largest concentration of the bruins in the contiguous United States.

Fatal attacks in the region are rare. There have been three in 20 years, including this latest one, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

In 2001, a hunter was killed by a grizzly with two cubs while the hunter was gutting an elk at a wildlife management area west of Ovando. The three animals were shot and killed by wildlife officials days later.

Over the past 20 years, there have been eight fatal maulings of people by grizzlies from a separate population of about 700 bears in and around Yellowstone National Park. In April, a backcountry guide was killed by a grizzly bear while fishing along the park’s border in southwestern Montana.

Bears that attack people aren’t always killed if the mauling resulted from a surprise encounter or the bear was defending its young. But the bear involved in Lokan’s death is considered a public safety threat because of the circumstances of the attack, Lemon said.

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Two people were shot, one critically, near Benito Juarez High School in Pilsen Thursday afternoon.

Authorities responded to the shooting about 12:10 p.m. at Cermak Road and Ashland Avenue, Chicago fire officials said.

A female was taken to Stroger Hospital in critical condition, officials said. A male went to the University of Illinois at Chicago Hospital. His condition was not immediately known.

Chicago police didn’t immediately release details.

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Athletes often take abuse on social media.

But a new study by Pickswise says Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James takes much more than any other athlete in the world.

The study says James received 122,568 abusive messages, which is an average of nearly 336 per day.

Pickswise says the data was collected from Twitter posts with words, phrases and hashtags with abusive terms directed at athletes between June 2020 and June 2021.

Soccer star Marcus Rashford received the second most messages at 32,328, while Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady ranked third with 28,151.

Other athletes ranked in the top 10 are Brooklyn Nets forward Kevin Durant (No. 4 at 24,370), NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace (No. 5 at 21,750), Portland Trail Blazers guard Damian Lillard (No. 6 at 20,904), Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer (No. 7 at 14,083), soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo (No. 8 at 11,757), Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry (No. 9 at 11,203) and soccer player Mesut Ozil (No. 10 at 11,192).

James has been the target of some criticism on social media — most recently following a tweet about the fatal shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant, a 16-year-old Black girl in Columbus. The tweet caused a Cincinnati area bar to say they wouldn’t show NBA games on TV until James was “expelled” by the NBA. James later said he “fueled the wrong conversation” with his initial tweet.

Read more at usatoday.com

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My brother has been a hostage of the Taliban’s Haqqani network since Jan. 31, 2020 — but you may never have heard his name.

Mark Frerichs, who is from the Chicago suburb of Lombard, has been a civil engineer living in Afghanistan for the past decade. When I spoke with him a couple days before he was kidnapped in Kabul, Afghanistan, he told me with pride about having worked on a municipal water project. He has always been good with his hands and wanted to do something to rebuild a country that had seen decades of destruction.

It is perplexing to think that an American veteran — Mark previously served in the U.S. Navy — has been a hostage under Taliban control for 17 months, yet this fact is virtually unspoken as our military rightfully withdraws from a 20-year war in Afghanistan.

As noted in a Sun-Times editorial on Thursday, a series of unforced errors that define Mark’s captivity present a case study in how to waste diplomatic leverage.

The cascade of errors started with the Trump Administration valuing a declaration of an end to the war in Afghanistan above saving the life of an American veteran. Mark was seized a full month before the U.S. signed a peace accord with the Taliban on Feb. 29, 2020, yet our nation’s chief negotiator, Zal Khalilzad, never mentioned Mark to the Taliban before signing the deal.

Roger Carstens, the United States special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, was engaged early in Mark’s ordeal, but all diplomatic efforts related to Afghanistan had to go through Khalilzad, who proved to be an unfortunate bottleneck. Until very recently,D Carstens was precluded from talking with the Taliban or the governments of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Qatar or anyone else who could help to get Mark home.

When asked about Mark in 2020, the Taliban representative said he was safe and healthy and then asked about Bashir Noorzai, a major Afghan drug trafficker who has been in a U.S. prison for the past 16 years. Noorzai’s release is the only thing the Taliban has indicated it wants in return for freeing Mark, but some parts of our government have opposed a swap, fearing it would set a bad precedent.

Of course, such swaps have been agreed to numerous times before. The precedent was set long ago. There was, for example, the very public exchange of hostages and prisoners in 2016 when the Iran nuclear deal was implemented.

Former President Trump, the self-proclaimed master negotiator, apparently did not lift a finger to get Mark home, but our family had great hope that President Biden would make Mark more of a priority. Despite asking twice for a call, we have yet to hear directly from the president, though, and he’s never said Mark’s name publicly.

We haven’t even heard from Khalilzad, who remains the point man in negotiations with the Taliban since Biden took office.

We support bringing our troops home. We support rescuing those Afghans who worked with the United States during the war. But the fact remains that Biden’s announcement that all troops now will be withdrawn by Sept. 11 has made it only harder to get Mark back home.

The president’s announcement amounts to a missed opportunity to trade Mark for Noorzai and, at the same time, perhaps gain an extension of a cease fire and a power-sharing agreement with the Afghan government.

Our senator from Illinois, Tammy Duckworth, tells us she has spoken with President Biden about Mark, and that he’s assured her he’s doing all he can to bring Mark home. We also recently heard that Ambassador Carstens finally has been given clearance from our government to meet with the Taliban, and that our government has reached out to ask Pakistan, Afghanistan and Qatar for help.

I don’t understand why our government waited so long to do these obvious and basic things. Why didn’t they try to get my brother home when we had greater leverage? Why is he just now being mentioned, when our troops are almost completely out of Afghanistan and when the military bases we might have used for a rescue mission have been closed?

Mark wasn’t grabbed because of anything unique to Mark. He was grabbed because he’s a U.S. citizen and the Taliban wanted something to trade. Our government ignored that simple truth for the past 17 months.

On July 13, Mark will turn 59. Our family prays every day that he’ll be home by then to blow out the candles on a birthday cake.

And we dearly hope the diplomatic efforts we’re hearing about now, finally, will not be too little and too late.

Charlene Cakora is the sister of Mark Frerichs.

Send letters to [email protected].

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NEW YORK — Naomi Osaka says former first lady Michelle Obama and sports stars Novak Djokovic, Michael Phelps and Stephen Curry were among those who reached out to offer support after she withdrew from the French Open to take a mental health break.

In an essay in Time magazine’s Olympic preview issue, on sale Friday, Osaka — a four-time Grand Slam champion and former No. 1-ranked player — wrote that she hopes “we can enact measures to protect athletes, especially the fragile ones,” and suggests they be allowed to sometimes skip media obligations without punishment.

“There can be moments for any of us where we are dealing with issues behind the scenes,” the 23-year-old Osaka said. “Each of us as humans is going through something on some level.”

She said before the French Open began that she would not speak to the media during that tournament, saying those interactions were sometimes uncomfortable and would create doubts for her on the court. After her first-round victory in Paris, Osaka was fined $15,000 for skipping her mandatory news conference and threatened by the four Grand Slam tournaments with the possibility of disqualification or suspension if she continued to avoid the media.

Osaka then pulled out of that tournament, saying she deals with anxiety before news conferences and has experienced bouts of depression in recent years.

“Believe it or not, I am naturally introverted and do not court the spotlight,” she wrote for Time. “I always try to push myself to speak up for what I believe to be right, but that often comes at a cost of great anxiety.”

She hasn’t played since Paris, also sitting out Wimbledon, which ends Sunday.

She will return to competition at the Tokyo Olympics, which open July 23, and where she will represent her native Japan.

“It has become apparent to me that literally everyone either suffers from issues related to their mental health or knows someone who does,” Osaka wrote in her essay, adding later: “I do hope that people can relate and understand it’s OK to not be OK, and it’s OK to talk about it.”

On the topic of news conferences, Osaka said she thinks the “format itself is out of date and in great need of a refresh.”

She also proposed giving tennis players “a small number of ‘sick days’ per year, where you are excused from your press commitments without having to disclose your personal reasons. I believe this would bring sport in line with the rest of society.”

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