Police investigation of Trevor Bauer handed to prosecutors

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This article was published 27/08/2021 (1520 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Police on Friday presented to prosecutors their investigation of Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer in the case of a woman who said he choked her into unconsciousness, punched her repeatedly and had anal sex with her without her consent during two sexual encounters.

The Pasadena Police Department delivered the results of the three-month investigation to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office and the case is under review, district attorney’s spokesman Greg Risling said.

Bauer’s representatives declined to comment. An email seeking comment sent to the woman’s attorney was not immediately answered.

The move comes just over a week after a judge denied the 27-year-old San Diego woman’s request for a restraining order against Bauer.

The woman said she sought the order when she learned that the criminal investigation against Bauer was likely to take a long time. She had spoken to police in San Diego when she was in the hospital after her second encounter with Bauer, in mid-May, and gave her account to detectives from Pasadena, where Bauer lives, soon after.

After a four-day hearing last week that aired much of the evidence that police probed and that prosecutors will consider, Judge Dianna Gould-Saltman found that Bauer honored the woman’s boundaries when the woman set them, and could not have known about those he violated because she didn’t express them clearly.

“We consider in a sexual encounter that when a woman says no she should be believed,” Gould-Saltman said, “so what should we do when she says yes?”

Gould-Saltman called the woman’s petition for the order “materially misleading.”

Bauer’s attorney Shawn Holley said they were grateful for the denial, which they had expected.

The 30-year-old pitcher is also under investigation by Major League Baseball, and could face punishment under its Joint Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Policy. The league put him on paid administrative leave on July 2. On Friday, that was extended until Sept. 3.

Bauer has said through representatives that everything that happened between the two was “wholly consensual” in the nights they spent together in April and May at his Pasadena home.

The woman gave three days of dramatic and emotional testimony at the hearing, saying Bauer went well beyond what she consented to, including punching her in the face and vagina and leaving serious bruising that was captured in photographs. She said Bauer also did things that she couldn’t consent to because she had been choked unconscious, including having anal sex with her while she was out.

“I felt like my soul left my body, and I was terrified,” she said. “I couldn’t fight back,” the woman said from the stand.

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While acknowledging the injuries in the photographs were “terrible,” the judge said the woman “was not ambiguous about wanting rough sex in the parties’ first encounter, and wanting rougher sex in the second encounter.”

The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they have been victims of sexual assault.

Earlier this year, after winning his first Cy Young with the Cincinnati Reds last season, Bauer agreed to a $102 million, three-year contract to join his hometown Dodgers.

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