“People can consent to things that we might normally find shocking,” Ritter said, drawing an analogy to people who participate in combat sports.
County prosecutor, said a key legal question in considering whether to file charges would have been whether it was reasonable for Bauer to believe he had consent to do what he did - even if those actions would appear stunning to some. Joshua Ritter, a criminal defense lawyer who worked for years as an L.A. When the line becomes blurry - ‘I wanted rough sex, but I didn’t want to be choked to the point of unconsciousness’ - when does one cross the line?” “Usually it’s, ‘I went to his house and maybe I wanted to do X, Y, Z, but I certainly didn’t want to have sex with him.’ There’s a clear line. “Usually it’s all or nothing,” said Rahmani.
When the woman set boundaries, Bauer had respected them, the judge said, adding that after considering the evidence she’d determined that the woman was “not ambiguous about wanting rough sex in the … first encounter and wanting rougher sex in the second encounter.”īecause the case involved rough sex, the lines were murkier than what is often seen in cases in which sexual assault allegations culminate in criminal charges, said former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani.
“While we did have consensual, rough sex,” he said, “the disturbing acts and conduct she described simply did not occur.”Ī judge ultimately denied the request for a restraining order last year, saying there’d been a distinction between what the woman thought permissible and what she had communicated to Bauer. After the second encounter, Bauer’s lawyers wrote in a court filing, the woman had sent a message to her cousin and written, “It was consensual, but I didn’t like expect two black eyes!?”īauer released a seven-minute video titled “The Truth,” on Tuesday, saying he was relieved to finally speak publicly on the matter and categorically denying allegations that he had punched the woman in the face and vagina. The pitcher’s attorneys had previously filed court papers arguing that messages sent by the accuser had made it clear that she had, in fact, encouraged him to choke her during sex. “I felt like my soul left my body,” she testified at a hearing on the restraining order in August.ĭuring that hearing, Bauer’s attorney argued the same point that Bauer himself made Tuesday in his first public comments on the case, following the prosecutors’ decision.īauer said that he and the woman had engaged in rough, but wholly consensual sex on two occasions. During the second encounter, she alleged that Bauer used a closed fist to hit her in the jaw and vagina. In both instances, she alleged, Bauer wrapped her hair around her neck until she lost consciousness. Last summer, a San Diego woman sought a restraining order against the Dodgers pitcher, saying that after meeting Bauer through social media she had visited his home in Pasadena on two separate occasions earlier that year.īoth times, she said, encounters that began as consensual sex escalated far beyond what she was comfortable with. “This case raises the question of how far does consent go?” said Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson. prosecutors’ decision not to file criminal charges against Trevor Bauer will propel evolving conversations about how the judicial system handles cases that hinge on questions of consent, and where boundaries should be drawn in instances involving rough sex.