LOS ANGELES — The woman requesting a permanent restraining order against Trevor Bauer explained on Tuesday why she waited six weeks to file her request following a violent encounter with the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher.
The woman, whom ESPN is not naming because she says she is a victim of sexual assault, last saw Bauer on May 17 and didn’t obtain the temporary restraining order against him until June 29, a 43-day gap that Bauer’s attorneys have highlighted in their attempts to prove she didn’t require a restraining order in the first place. As part of her testimony on Tuesday, however, the woman told her attorney that she waited because a detective from Pasadena, California, told her on two separate occasions that Bauer would be arrested.
“I waited as long as I could,” the woman said from the witness stand in L.A. County Superior Court. “And when I hit the point of realizing they were gonna take a while for this investigation, I had to protect myself in the meantime.”
Bauer has yet to be arrested or charged; the Pasadena Police Department’s criminal investigation has been ongoing for about three months. Major League Baseball is conducting a separate investigation that has kept Bauer on administrative leave and away from the Dodgers since July 2.
Bauer’s attorneys have strongly denied the sexual assault allegations made by the woman in her protective-order declaration and were given their first opportunity to cross-examine her on Tuesday. One of Bauer’s attorneys, Shawn Holley, questioned the woman for what amounted to about two and a half hours on Day 2 of a hearing that will determine whether the restraining order against Bauer will become permanent, which in California can last up to five years.
Holley’s cross-examination, on the heels of an emotional first day highlighted by the woman’s graphic portrayals of Bauer’s alleged assault, focused largely on the woman’s text messages with Bauer and members of her inner circle, some of which were not part of her initial declaration. Those messages, Bauer’s attorneys allege, depict the woman either making fun of Bauer; expressing an ulterior motive, most notably when she tells a colleague she has her “hooks in” and “can get in his head”; and having no illusions of an “intimate relationship” with Bauer, one of the state’s prerequisites for a domestic violence restraining order.
The woman began to cry when Holley said, “I have a couple of questions that I think are relevant. I’m not asking this question because I am slut-shaming you, not at all.”
The woman continued to cry as Holley questioned her about a text message exchange she had with someone the woman described as a former friend. In the texts, she referenced San Diego Padres shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr., whom the woman said she had a sexual relationship with in 2019. When Holley asked to identify the subject of another text message that read, “Trevor is a wackadoodle like Clev,” the woman cried harder and responded, “I don’t need to answer that.”
“He doesn’t need to be brought into this,” the woman said.
The judge told her she did need to answer the question, to which she said she had a sexual relationship with Padres pitcher Mike Clevinger in October 2020. A representative for Clevinger declined ESPN’s request for comment; a representative for Tatis had not responded by the time of publication.
Kelly Valencia, the forensic nurse examiner who performed the Sexual Assault Response Team (SART) exam on the woman after midnight on May 17, also testified on Tuesday. Valencia, a nurse with more than 40 years of experience, said the injuries she documented were consistent with the woman’s description of what happened to her during sex with Bauer, including being strangled with her own hair and being punched in her face, on her buttocks and in her genitals.
“I had never seen that before,” Valencia said of the bruising she documented on the area outside the woman’s vagina. “It was frankly alarming.”
The day began with the woman continuing to answer questions from one of her attorneys, Lisa Helfend-Meyer, in which she detailed how poorly she felt after the second sexual encounter with Bauer. She was asked by Meyer about a text message she sent to her cousin following the second encounter, in which she stated that it was “consensual” while showing a picture of her facial injuries. The woman testified she didn’t truly believe the encounter was consensual, saying: “I lost any chance of giving consent after the first time he choked me out.”
The woman said she told one of her best friends, who is expected to testify on Wednesday, about the details of what took place with Bauer during the second sexual encounter but said she tried to keep most of what occurred hidden from almost everybody else. She testified that she was hesitant to visit an emergency room “because I knew how it was gonna go.”
“I knew how it worked,” she said. “Publicity, the situation. Immediately it paints me as a slut. And I didn’t want this story anywhere. I didn’t. I was so embarrassed about all of it.”
The woman described her interaction with the Pasadena police officers who questioned her on May 18 as “very degrading” because a detective working on the case “slut-shamed me.” She called the process of speaking with the Pasadena detective “one of the most traumatic parts of this whole scenario,” saying the officer lied to her twice.
“I was told by the Pasadena Police two different times that they were going to arrest [Bauer],” the woman said. A representative from the Pasadena Police Department declined to comment, adding that doing so “would compromise the integrity of the investigation.”
Near the end of the day, Holley introduced a text message exchange between Bauer and the woman that took place between the first and second sexual encounter. Holley said the exchange shows the woman never expressed displeasure to Bauer about their first encounter and indicated she wanted rough sex, including being choked and hit.
In the texts, the woman says, “Gimme all the pain. Rawr.” Holley asked the woman why that message, and others in that exchange, were not included in the original declaration.
“In light of the fact that you were providing to the court a narrative about rough sex performed on you by Trevor, did you not think it was of critical importance to tell the judge that you asked for it?” Holley went on to ask.
The woman started to answer that she never asked to be “punched all over my body to the point where I had to be hospitalized” before her attorney objected to the question.
The judge allowed Holley to proceed with her question. Holley asked: “Did you not think that it was of critical importance to let the court know that you asked for sex to be rougher and harder and that you had never been more turned on? Did you not think it was important to let the court know that?”
“No,” the woman responded.
It was then, at 4:15 p.m. PT, that the judge ordered court to adjourn for the day.
Credit: Source link