Sometime, hopefully soon, the justice system will have its say in the matter of Trevor Bauer.
Either charges will be filed, or the investigation will be closed. He may be convicted, or he may be absolved of guilt in a court of law. All of this will happen without my input or yours, and that is exactly the way it should be.
So, my question for you is not about legalities. It is not about due process or the parameters of assault. My question is simply this:
Can you imagine watching Bauer play baseball anytime soon?
Given what we have already seen and heard, is there any way you can enjoy a baseball game knowing that the pitcher on the mound has been accused of punching, choking and violating a woman during consensual sex?
Because, during a recent civil court ruling that went in the player’s favor, his lawyers seemed to win more points by questioning the woman’s culpability rather than Bauer’s role in her injuries. In other words, she agreed to rough sex — and even asked for it — and this was the result.
Meanwhile, the question of whether Bauer may or may not have punched and choked her was practically treated as a foregone conclusion.
The judge even seemed to acknowledge this, despite describing the woman’s injuries as “terrible.”
“If she set limits and he exceeded them, this case would have been clear,” Judge Dianna Gould-Saltman said in her ruling. “But she set limits without considering all the consequences, and respondent did not exceed limits that the petitioner set.”
It’s hard to imagine the black eyes the woman had in widely circulated photos and a nurse’s testimony of the bruising around the woman’s vagina as “alarming” were what she had in mind when she agreed to be choked, but her consent makes the issue vague enough for different interpretations.
Last week’s hearing involved a restraining order and whether the Dodgers pitcher should be viewed as a future threat to the woman, and so the judge’s ruling does not necessarily reflect on his guilt or innocence in a potential criminal case. For, even if a person agrees to rough sex, there is still a limit regarding the amount of violence one party can inflict on another.
But, again, those are legal distinctions. And those determinations are best left to police, attorneys and, perhaps, a jury down the road.
For the rest of us, it’s more a question of right or wrong.
And I don’t mean that as some kind of judgment on Bauer’s sex life. If he chooses celibacy, that’s his business. If he chooses wild and frequent sex, that’s also his business. We’ve got no right to stick our noses in his bedroom for prurient purposes.
But we do get to judge how we all treat one another.
And that’s what makes it difficult to imagine voluntarily watching Bauer pitch, or blithely following any team he is on in the near future.
Based on last week’s testimony, there was not a lot of pushback regarding the woman’s claims of violence. That, as the woman has alleged, Bauer repeatedly punched her in the face, vagina and buttocks. That he used her own hair to choke her unconscious. That, when she awoke, he was sodomizing her without her consent.
Perhaps there will not be enough evidence to support those claims beyond a reasonable doubt. Maybe the woman’s own text messages and subsequent conversations with friends will continue to cast her as a willing participant. And her omission of some facts in her petition for a restraining order has not helped her credibility, and called into question her motives.
So, yes, there may be a path for Bauer to avoid prosecution.
But there is a difference between being criminally negligent and morally responsible. And we, as a nation of fans, have the right to voice our concerns if we deem that behavior has crossed a line from distasteful to repugnant.
This is not the first time Bauer has been accused of unflattering conduct. He has a history of being confrontational on social media and, in his introductory Dodgers news conference earlier this year, acknowledged he has made mistakes when he was asked about harassing women online. He was also accused by an Ohio woman of assault during consensual sex several years ago, according to a Washington Post report.
Does all of that add up to guilt beyond a doubt in this case? Perhaps not. But, for many, it paints an ugly portrait of who Bauer is.
And so we are free to treat him the way he has been accused of treating women:
With complete disdain and disregard.
