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In 2020, he won the prestigious Cy Young Award, a signal he had risen to the starry heights of Major League Baseball in the US.
The award, given annually in the American League and National League, had been Trevor Bauer’s dream for ten years. He had kept a picture of the award as his lock screen on his phone, to remind him that if he worked hard enough, he could claim it as his own one day.
“It’s 10 years of hard work and studying and time, a lot of really bad games, a lot of tough learning experiences. But when I go take a picture of it here in a second and change my phone background, it’ll be a pretty cool moment,” Bauer told reporters at the time, as the Cincinnati superstar became the first ever Reds Pitcher to win the coveted Award.
But how quickly things can change.
The celebrations were short-lived. Just one year later, the then 30 year-old’s career came crashing to a nightmarish halt, after he was accused of sexual abuse by a woman he admitted having a sexual relationship with. Starting pitcher for the LA Dodgers one minute, and a national villain the next, the allegations saw Bauer immediately distanced from and shunned by his employers and put on trial by the media.
Just three days after the rape accusations were reported in the media, Bauer was suspended by the Los Angeles Dodgers and placed on administrative leave. Two years on, he lives in Japan, and he’s never pitched in the major leagues since.
In fact, Bauer received the longest non-lifetime suspension in Major League Baseball history over the accusations, which he continually and strenuously denied — and which we now know were patently untrue. They were deeply harrowing, and the media made a headlong rush to report on the claims that Bauer had raped, and beaten, and sexually assaulted the woman he had slept with.
The woman, who we now know is Ms Lindsey Hill, accused him not only of raping her, but of perpetrating an attack so violent and terrifying that she sustained a fractured skull.
Yet legal documents noted that her CT scans had shown no fractures, stating:
“Despite CT scans showing no fractures in her head, face, and neck…petitioner nonetheless stated in her affidavit that she had 14 “signs of a basilar skull fracture”…when she definitively knew that her own CT scans had ruled out any fracture.”
Images provided by Hill, showing bruising and cuts, were also edited according to Bauer’s legal team, who said she had “deliberately mischaracterised her medical records” and “given a misleading impression of her injuries.”
While Bauer insisted all along he was innocent and had faced no charges, that did not stop his career from falling to pieces. While he was eventually reinstated to the league, the damage had already been done. No domestic teams showed interest, and seemingly banished from the league he once dominated, Bauer subsequently moved to Japan, where he still plays in a minor league.
Now, a full two years after the sex charges were first reported, Bauer has released a video, speaking out against the apparently false charges which have effectively destroyed his career and his name among millions of people:
2 years later and I can finally talk about this ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/o6jFqMzY05
— Trevor Bauer (トレバー・バウアー) (@BauerOutage) October 2, 2023
In the video, he explains he can finally address the claims publicly two years on, claims which saw him ostracised and cancelled in the US. He has only been afforded the chance to clear his name now, after settling the legal dispute with his accuser, which saw her withdraw the allegations and come away from the whole sorry affair empty-handed.
“2 years later and I can finally talk about this,” Bauer said, before going on to show screenshots of damning private messages the woman had sent friends, along with a video of her “smirking at the camera without a care in the world” while lying next to Bauer on the morning after the alleged assault.
Texts shared in the video show that Hill had set her sights on Bauer before she had even met him, with one text sent to a friend reading: “Next victim. Star pitcher for the dodgers.”
Her pursuit of the athlete, clearly motivated by the allure of his superstar wealth, led her to joke with a friend: “What should I steal?” in reference to visiting Bauer’s house for the first time. That friend replied by saying, “take his money.”
As detailed by Bauer in the video, Hill told a friend, “I’m going to his house wednesday. I already have my hooks in. You know how I roll.” She later excitedly texted a pal that Bauer’s net worth “is 51 mil” to which her friend encouraged her, “bitch you better secure the bag!”
But, as Bauer asks, how exactly was she going to do this? Hill explained her apparent strategy in further texts to a friend, which provide an insight into how she planned to establish and exploit a sexual relationship with the athlete.
“Need daddy to choke me out,” she wrote. “Being an absolute WHORE to try and get in on his 51 million.”
Bauer detailed how Hill’s legal team had approached him multiple times about coming to a financial settlement over the course of the last two years, despite the case falling apart at the seams in the courtroom. The most condemning evidence which tore apart the rape claims includes a video which was deliberately concealed from Bauer and his legal team.
In it, Hill is seen grinning at the camera, while lying beside the sleeping baseball player. She filmed the clip herself the morning after she claimed she had been brutally attacked, emotionally traumatised and desperate to get away from Bauer.
He notes there are no marks on her face, and says of the video: “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.”
A judge, after hearing all evidence, ruled that Lindsey Hill had deliberately misled the court, and found her claims to be “materially misleading.” The judge also denied Hill’s requests for a domestic violence restraining order, and she found that no sexual assault or non-consensual conduct had taken place.
It is now clear that an innocent man was persecuted viciously and lost two years of his life for something he did not do. There was a calculated plan in place, from an unstable woman, to derail Bauer’s life and to extort him.
People distanced themselves from him as soon as unfounded allegations broke, and he was suspended from a glittering career without all of the evidence being seen.
He has lost two years right in the prime of his life and baseball career. He has also lost millions of dollars, in the money he would have made, and in the legal fees he has paid.
What’s more, there will probably always be people who will believe Bauer is guilty, because he has been plastered all over the media for two whole years. It seems that one reporter in US sports media, who had evidence to the contrary, published an article spewing the false claims that Bauer had fractured the woman’s skull. She knew was not true, but the insatiable thirst in this case was not for truth, but for punishment:
HOLY SHLIT
Journalist @Molly_Knight formerly of The Athletic reported that pitcher Trevor Bauer fractured the skull of Lindsey Hill
At the time, The Athletic had copies of Hill's medical records which showed there was no fracture
She reported it anyway pic.twitter.com/Szn7GhAl2U
— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) October 3, 2023
He was cancelled to such an extent that he had to leave the States to continue playing baseball professionally and start a new life. We all know that once you have been convicted in the court of public opinion, it’s almost impossible to redeem yourself. If it is at all possible, it takes years to mend a damaged reputation.
There may always be a dark grey cloud hanging over Bauer, while the implications for his personal life and future relationships are surely there too.
As Bauer notes, “The fact is, I was never arrested. I was never charged with a crime. And the only legal proceeding took place without my side of the story being heard.”
When did we become so unwilling to even hear the man’s side of the story? In the culture of ‘Me Too’, we now have a media environment which is very careful to follow the script on these issues. It no longer seems to be the case that a person is innocent until proven guilty.
And what does this case say about our society’s attitude to men? There is very much a sense, seen in the way this case was handled, that any man can be presumed to be an abuser or wrongdoer because a woman has made an allegation.
Why do we seem to believe that men are capable of lying, but not women? We seem determined to forget that women are also capable of taking advantage of men for their own gain.
We now appear to have a culture of telling ‘your truth’ as opposed to the truth, and at this stage, the very movement which may have started as a means to ensure accountability and justice, has created some dire situations where men are hung, drawn and quartered, without a hearing, because we are led to believe that our default belief should only be in the woman’s side of the story.
I also think that men like Bauer, while innocent of any crime, might reflect on how their behaviour has contributed to this messed-up culture. They are acting as if they are controlled by their urges rather than by their brain, to the extent where they are blinded to the logical dangers of sleeping with women they hardly know. Hookups have a multitude of consequences, something I think we have slowly come to realise — with the evidence showing less young people are having casual sex.
It may be the case that the Me Too movement, which has certainly given a welcome prominence to women’s voices, can also being used as a vehicle through which a small number of women — who are more likely to be emotionally wounded from such encounters than men — can take out some of the hurt, damage and anger that has been inflicted from sleeping with men who really couldn’t care less.
There’s also the very worrying aspect of legitimate victims being disbelieved and afraid to come forward with genuine stories of sexual or domestic abuse. Unfortunately, for too long, women were not believed when rapes and assaults happened. There is a long history of disbelieving women, but that does not mean that evidence and giving men the presumption of innocence until proven guilty is not also importance.
Any women who lie about rape and sexual assault are undoing progress which has been made in hearing women’s stories, and will only delegitimise and undermine the stories of real victims, and make it far more difficult for them to be believed.
Frankly, Lindsey Hill should not walk free. She should go to jail for the same amount of time that Trevor Bauer would have got had he raped her. This case shows that false accusations are every bit as destructive and damaging as the evil of rape itself, and should be treated as such. We cannot allow situations to continue, where women who falsely accuse men and set out to dismantle their lives, are never held to account.
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