Where does Trevor Bauer go to get his reputation back?
His MLB career?
Two years of his life down the toilet, the lost opportunities, the stress of being falsely accused as a violent rapist: How does he rewind the clock?
He can’t. Nobody ever can.
You’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty in this country, but the former Dodgers pitcher never had a chance.
The media lynch mob delighted in targeting the Trump-supporting climate skeptic.
He lost the dream career he’d toiled for since he was a little boy.
At age 30, he had to go to a new country and start over again, while back home he was the “disgraced Trevor Bauer.”
Accuser’s history
His accuser, Lindsey Hill, 29, is a slim, blond bunny boiler from San Diego who previously had been involved romantically with San Diego Padres right fielder Fernando Tatis Jr. and Chicago White Sox pitcher Mike Clevinger.
Unfortunately for Bauer, he followed suit and had dalliances with Hill in April and May 2021, after which she accused him of choking her unconscious and punching her during sex, causing her to be hospitalized.
Her lawyer released photographs of her face with black eyes, a cut lip and a scratch.
In a sworn declaration Hill claimed she suffered two black eyes, a bloodied swollen lip, significant bruising and scratching to one side of her face and a “skull fracture.”
In a MeToo-cowed industry, the abrasive, uncompromising loner was the perfect scapegoat, his photogenic accuser too good to be true.
Bauer was finished.
The Dodgers cut and ran.
Major League Baseball suspended him without pay for a record 324 games.
Just on allegations.
The police investigation ended with no charges filed against Bauer.
Hill’s attempt to get a restraining order against him failed when a Californian court found she was “materially misleading.”
Bauer didn’t pitch a game for 22 months, until he went to Japan and signed with the Yokohama DeNA BayStars, for a fraction of his Dodger contract.
Suspicious texts
But instead of going quietly, he fought back.
He sued Hill for defamation, claiming she “fabricated allegations of sexual assault” to create a “media blitz” to destroy his baseball career, “garner attention for herself” and “extract millions of dollars” from him.
He also sued media outlets Deadspin and The Athletic.
Hill countersued for sexual battery.
On Monday, both sides withdrew their lawsuits without a penny changing hands and with Bauer retaining his right to speak about the case.
He posted a video on X, saying the lawsuit was “never about the money for me. It was the only way for me to obtain critical information to clear my name.”
That “critical information” included text messages allegedly sent by Hill which Bauer reads aloud in his video.
“Next victim. Star pitcher for the dodgers,” she texts a friend before meeting Bauer.
“What should I steal?” she asks another friend before visiting his house for the first time. The answer: “Take his money.”
Bauer continues reading from the texts: “Then after the first time we met, ‘Net worth is 51mil’ she [texted]. ‘B–ch, you better secure the bag!’ was the response. But how was she going to do that? ‘Need daddy to choke me out?’ she said, and ‘Being an absolute whore to try to get in on his 51 million.’ ”
Then Bauer plays a Snapchat video “taken by Lindsay Hill herself the morning after she claimed she was brutally attacked.”
Hill can be seen mugging for the camera with a sleeping Bauer by her side.
Her face appears unmarked. No scratches, no swelling, no blood on her lips, no injuries of any kind. She does not look traumatized. She looks triumphant.
“You can see her lying in bed next to me while I’m sleeping, smirking at the camera without a care in the world or any marks on her face,” says Bauer in his video.
“And now we have the metadata, so there can be no dispute it was taken mere minutes before she left my house on the morning of May 16, 2021 . . .
“I think it paints a pretty clear picture of what actually happened the evening of May 15th and why the video was originally concealed from us . . .
“As I’ve said from Day One, I never sexually assaulted Lindsey Hill or anyone else for that matter.”
Nothing’s free
It’s a poisonous world for a young man with fame and fortune. Let them take the lesson that there is no such thing as free sex. There are always expectations.
Meanwhile, the day after Bauer’s vindication video, Hill was yukking it up on comedian Alex Stein’s show.
The self-described recovering alcoholic smeared Bauer, saying “several different women” had accused him. She played the victim: “I just didn’t know that it would reach this level of hate for me.”
She claimed bad lighting was to blame for the absence of injuries in her morning-after video.
“That video was taken with no lights on in the room . . . So a lot of differences between natural light and all that stuff . . . If you zoom in, the scratches are all there. You can’t see if there’s a shadow on my face.”
It will never end until there are penalties for making false allegations that ruin a man’s life.
Hill needs to be charged, like Jussie Smollett was for faking a hate crime.
Without consequences, malignant behavior only proliferates.
Nancy played a fool
Silly Kevin McCarthy. He trusted Nancy Pelosi.
In his valedictory speech, the vanquished speaker casually let slip how his Democratic predecessor stiffed him.
“It’s interesting. It was in this room after we had won the majority, and I became speaker and Nancy Pelosi came to me and was speaker at the time on the way out. I told her I was having issues with getting enough votes. She said, ‘What’s the problem?’ ”
McCarthy confided in Pelosi that the holdouts wanted him to agree to a rules change that allowed any single lawmaker to file a motion to oust the speaker.
“And she said, ‘Just give it to them. I’ll always back you up . . . because I believe in the institution.’ I think today was a political decision by the Democrats.”
No kidding, Einstein. If for no other reason, McCarthy’s naivete disqualified him for the job.
At least he got in a final swipe when he had Pelosi thrown out of her Capitol office.