He has contested these accounts, but has also, perversely, joked about them, exhibiting amusement about his ability to sail above the rap against him. In a profile of him that appeared in ESPN’s magazine in 2009, the writer Peter Keating describes Sterling’s arrival at an N.A.A.C.P. event that year. Sterling, referring to reporters’ interest in him, reportedly says, “They want to know why the N.A.A.C.P. would give an award to someone with my track record.”

The answer’s no mystery: money, which most certainly buys you love, in the form of encomiums, endorsements, acclaim. Just as you can purchase an ambassadorship, you can purchase an image of altruism, and if you want inoculation from, or forgiveness for, the bad you’ve done or may yet do, there are few strategies wiser than taking out your checkbook. Put enough commas and zeros in the amount you’re scribbling and the love will be all the larger. It will wash over you. It will cleanse you.

Sterling surely appreciated this. He placed newspaper ads celebrating Black History Month. He gave minority children free seats at Clippers games.

“He also has, over the years we looked at, contributed to a lot of minority charities, including the N.A.A.C.P.,” said Leon Jenkins, president of the organization’s Los Angeles chapter, at a transcendently awkward news conference on Monday. Jenkins was rationalizing the latest lifetime achievement award — which the N.A.A.C.P. has now rescinded — and its coddling of Sterling over time.

Jenkins dismissed the ugliness attributed to Sterling even before the audiotape as mere “rumors about someone’s character” that were best ignored. They simply didn’t receive as much publicity as the audiotape, which isn’t ignorable.