Sports website The Athletic settles defamation case brought by Trevor Bauer
Former MLB pitcher Trevor Bauer drops his defamation case against NY Times subsidiary The Athletic in exchange for a published clarification.
Trevor Bauer has dropped his defamation case against New York Times subsidiary The Athletic in exchange for a “clarification” over an article that they published back in June 2021, which kicked off a chain of events leading to his suspension from baseball.
The original story, titled “Graphic details, photos emerge in restraining order filed against Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer”, now carries a new editor’s note at the top which, while not retracting anything written, clarifies the content.
The note reads: “This story was an account of legal papers filed by a California woman who claimed she had been injured by Trevor Bauer during rough sex. The story has been revised to clarify that a CT scan found no evidence the woman suffered a skull fracture, and emergency room medical records attached to the woman’s request concluded she suffered no such fracture. The Athletic did not intend to state or imply that the woman suffered a fractured skull.”
In addition, they have removed from the body of the story inflammatory and, according to Bauer, inaccurate tweets by former Athletic journalist Molly Knight.
Bauer has always maintained that any sexual encounters were wholly consensual. In one of the tweets, Ms Knight said that it was “not possible to consent to a fractured skull.”
The original lawsuit was that The Athletic and Knight defamed Trevor Bauer by “creating and spreading the false narrative that Mr. Bauer fractured the skull.” The complaint goes on to say that “by deliberately omitting the CT scan results, The Athletic exhibited actual malice.”
Bauer and his legal team have agreed that the published clarification together with the removal of Ms Knight’s tweets makes any further action unnecessary.
Bauer’s agent Rachel Luba tweeted, “This lawsuit was about accountability for media in their reporting. Glad that The Athletic has acknowledged, corrected and added a clarification to its original report and that Molly Knight’s inaccurate tweets have been removed. Long overdue.”
While a police investigation into the incident found no grounds on which to charge Bauer, calling the alleged victim’s account as “unreliable”, MLB took the unprecedented action of suspending him for a whopping 324 games, amounting to two full seasons, under it’s own somewhat fuzzy domestic violence policy.
With public opinion firmly swayed against Trevor Bauer, regardless of any legal outcome, his MLB career is in tatters, perhaps forever. At the start of the 2023 season, he signed with the Yokohama DeNA BayStars in Japan’s NPL.