Former NBA star Lamar Odom was booed and heckled Thursday night when he arrived for an ethically dubious dinner President Donald Trump hosted for the top investors in his $TRUMP meme coin.
“Lamar, you’re better than this,” someone shouted outside the dinner venue at Trump’s luxury golf club in Northern Virginia as Odom moved through a crowd of booing protesters. “Lamar, what are you doing? Shame on you, Lamar.”
Odom, who played in the NBA from 1999 to 2014 and won championships with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2009 and 2010, was among the 220 people deemed a top holder of Trump’s meme coin ― a type of cryptocurrency based on an internet joke or public figure ― from April 23 to May 12, earning him an invite to the event billed as “the most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the World.”
Odom has been promoting his efforts to get into the event on social media and using his attendance as a platform to boost his own meme coin.
“Thanks to President Trump for supporting the meme philosophy,” Odom posted on social media after the event.
Odom is also famous for his televised wedding and marriage to Khloé Kardashian, which ended in divorce in 2016. In 2015, he was hospitalized in a comatose state after he was found unconscious in a Nevada brothel and later sought treatment for addiction.
Others in attendance at the dinner included Chinese billionaire Justin Sun, who runs the crypto platform Tron and earned the top spot on the $TRUMP leaderboard by spending more than $40 million on the meme coin.
“I’m very excited to meet him and discuss about crypto’s future,” Sun told The New York Times.
Korean cryptocurrency executive Sangrok Oh, another attendee, also told the Times he viewed the dinner as a “fundraiser” for Trump, who he believes will “always be good to his sponsors.”
Media wasn’t allowed inside the event, and Trump arrived and left without speaking to the press, but attendees shared with reporters that Trump only spoke for about 15-20 minutes and made minimal contact with the crowd despite billing the dinner as an “intimate” event.
“He helicoptered in, he helicoptered out. We didn’t really get to shake hands with him or anything, but it was a really interesting group of crypto people all in the same room,”a 32-year-old attendee from Texas, who declined to state his name, told NBC News. “It’s about what I expected. I got the chance to be pretty close to the president when he was giving his speech.”
Another attendee named Christoph Heuermann posted on Instagram that Trump didn’t “interact with the crowd other than enjoying being celebrated” and claimed that even the top holders of the coin ― whom Trump promised “an ultra-exclusive private VIP Reception with the President” ― didn’t get to “speak or even shake hands with the president.”
“It was still well worth it to experience the president live and watch his mightily secured arrival and departure,” Heuermann wrote.
