Dodgers star Trevor Bauer on leave amid sexual assault probe, Judge denies accuser restraining order
On Thursday, a California woman was denied a restraining order against Trevor Bauer when a superior court judge ruled that the woman did not make her boundaries on rough sex clear to the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher during an encounter that left her hospitalized. Judge Dianna Gould-Saltman agreed with Bauer’s attorneys that the woman led him to believe she wanted to be choked unconscious and have “all the pain,” as the woman texted the pitcher at one point.
Gould-Saltman said that it’s accepted a woman should be believed when she says “no” during a sexual encounter. “So what about when she says yes?” the judge asked rhetorically.
While Gould-Saltman conceded that photos of the woman’s injuries she reviewed were “terrible” and in other cases would result in a “per se condemnation” of the person who inflicted them, she found that the woman was “not ambiguous” about her desire for ever-rougher sex with Bauer and that he “couldn’t know the boundaries which [the woman] didn’t express to him.”
In her testimony this week, the woman said that during sex in May, Bauer choked her unconscious with her hair twice, and she awoke to him punching her in her face, cheekbones and vagina. The woman claimed that the force of Bauer’s assault left her unable to speak or even to utter a safe word she had given him fully. The woman, a self-described alcoholic who has been sober for less than two years, said she encouraged the rough sex because she blamed herself after an initial encounter. He choked her unconscious and allegedly sexually assaulted her. “I just wanted to create another experience where I could live up to what he wanted,” the woman testified earlier in the week. A forensic nurse examiner who studied and photographed her injuries shortly after the alleged assault testified as to bruises, swellings and lacerations on the woman’s face and head, as well as the most significant bruise she had seen in her career on a subject’s vaginal area.
But Gould-Saltman suggested in her decision Thursday that any injuries suffered while the woman was conscious — even if she were unable to tell him to stop — did not form a basis for a restraining order. “She testified that she wasn’t able to speak part of that time, but [Bauer] couldn’t know that,” Gould-Saltman said.
The judge also said that she found the accuser had been “materially misleading” in her court filing that requested a temporary order of protection, in which the woman claimed that Bauer had called or texted her “nonstop.” Gould-Saltman found that his calls to her after learning she had been hospitalized were to inquire whether she was okay.
The legal team for Bauer has been on paid leave since early July amid ongoing investigations by Major League Baseball and the Pasadena (Calif.) Police Department treated the judge’s decision as a significant victory. Bauer’s lawyer Shawn Holley, who during the three-day hearing portrayed the accuser as a liar who plotted to publicize her claims to force Bauer into a large financial settlement, stood with the pitcher and read a statement to reporters outside the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.
“While we have expected this outcome since the petition was filed in June, we appreciate the court reviewing all relevant information and testimony to make this informed decision,” Holley said. Bauer, who earlier in the day avoided testifying in the hearing by indicating he would plead the fifth on all questions, said nothing to reporters and was then whisked away with his team in a Mazda.
The woman and her lawyers did not comment to reporters following the decision. Her attorney, Lisa Helfend Meyer, said in an emailed statement Thursday: “While our client is disappointed about the judge’s ruling, she is hopeful that Mr Bauer will voluntarily seek the help he needs to make sure that no other woman in a dating relationship with him suffers the same traumatic fate that she did. That is why she was willing to come forward and endure the victim-blaming from Mr Bauer that she knew would inevitably result.”
Helfend Meyer, the woman’s attorney, rejected that defence during her own closing argument, noting that Bauer warning her that he liked sex “rougher than you” was “not informed consent.”
“I applaud [my client] that she was able to stand up to this monster and do the right thing,” Meyer said in court. “Whatever happens, [she] has revealed who Trevor Bauer is for all the world to see. Hopefully, he will get help and not do this in the future and not do this under the guise of consensual rough sex.”
In her testimony earlier in the week, the woman predicted how her allegations would be treated, saying that before police got Bauer’s name out of her, she was determined to keep the alleged assault secret.
She said: “I remember thinking, you know, that anyone I would tell this to is going to say, ‘She asked for it.’”
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