Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer filed a lawsuit this week against The Athletic and its former writer Molly Knight for defamation stemming from the outlet’s reporting on sexual assault allegations against him.
The New York Post reported in February that Bauer would not face charges over the allegations that he punched and choked a woman unconscious during sexual activity. Prior to that, a California Superior Court judge denied the accuser’s attempt to get a restraining order against Bauer, ruling that the Cy Young award winner didn’t pose a threat to the woman. The judge also ruled that the woman’s injuries “were not the result of anything she verbally objected to before or during the encounter,” ESPN reported in August 2021.
The woman, who has not been named in media reports and has been referred to only as “Ms. Hill” in court documents, claimed that Bauer punched her, choked her, and left scratches and bruises on her face. Bauer admitted to having sex with the accuser but said that the roughness was consensual and that he did not do as she claimed. In February, Bauer defended himself in a YouTube video.
“While this is not the time or the place to address every single lie or falsehood that this woman or her lawyers made to the court, I do want to be crystal clear about a few things,” Bauer said in the video, according to the Post. “I never punched this woman in the face. I never punched her in the vagina. I never scratched her face. I never had anal sex with her or sodomized her in any way. I never assaulted her in any way at any time. While we did have consensual rough sex, the disturbing acts and conduct that she described simply did not occur.”
Bauer also said that the photos of the woman with black eyes and bruises had been edited. His attorney said that text messages between Bauer and his accuser involved “requests to be ‘choked out’ and slapped in the face.” The attorney also said that “the woman spent the night, and left without incident, continuing to message Mr. Bauer with friendly and flirtatious banter.”
Bauer’s lawsuit against The Athletic and Knight insist the outlet and writer “defamed Mr. Bauer by creating and spreading the false narrative that Mr. Bauer fractured the Complainant’s skull.”
The lawsuit claims The Athletic had access to the accuser’s medical records, which showed no skull fracture.
“There was no basis for that assertion because the Complainant’s own medical records — which The Athletic possessed — showed that she had no such fracture,” the lawsuit says. “Nonetheless, consistent with their prior and subsequent expressions of animus toward Mr. Bauer, The Athletic and Ms. Knight publicized that false attack, which was picked up and further disseminated to a larger audience by other media outlets and social media sites.”
The lawsuit says that Knight publicly, through her Twitter profile, said the accuser’s skull had been “cracked” or “fractured.”
“Defendants acted with actual malice because they deliberately ignored the truth — which was evident in the medical records possessed by The Athletic — and because the Defendants’ defamatory statements were part of a campaign to harass Mr. Bauer, as evidenced by, among other actions, their prior and subsequent false and misleading statements about his conduct and character, their efforts to dissuade Major League Baseball teams from signing him, and their strident complaints about the Los Angeles Dodgers’ decision to add him to their team,” the lawsuit says.
Bauer is also suing Deadspin for its coverage of the allegations.
The Athletic told the Post that it was “aware of legal action taken by Trevor Bauer,” and that the outlet was “confident in our reporting and plan to defend against the claim.”