On Tuesday, the second day of the civil lawsuit filed by a woman requesting a permanent restraining order against Trevor Bauer concluded.
The second day featured Bauer’s attorney cross-examining the woman, aggressively questioning why she waited six weeks to file her request following a violent encounter with the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher.
The woman last saw Bauer on May 17 and did not obtain the temporary restraining order against him until June 29, a 43-day gap that Bauer’s attorney highlighted in their attempts to prove she didn’t require a restraining order in the first place.
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 not been arrested or charged yet. The Pasadena Police Department’s criminal investigation has been ongoing for almost three months. Meanwhile, the MLB is currently conducting a separate investigation that has kept Bauer on administrative leave and away from the Dodgers since July 2.
Shawn Holley, one of Bauer’s attorneys, questioned the woman for two and half hours.
Holley’s cross-examination mainly focused on the woman’s text messages with Bauer and members of her inner circle, some of which were not part of her initial declaration. Bauer’s attorneys allege the text messages depict the woman either making fun of Bauer or expressing an ulterior motive. The most notable messages were 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 continued to cry as Holley questioned her about a text message exchanged she had with a former friend. In the texts, she referenced San Diego Padres shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr., with whom the woman said she had a sexual relationship within 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. She was instructed by the Judge to answer the question, to which she said she had a sexual encounter with Padres pitcher Mike Clevinger.
Kelly Valencia, the forensic nurse examiner who performed the Sexual Assault Response Team (SART) exam on the woman, testified. Valencia, a nurse with more than 40 years of experience, said the injuries she documented were consistent with the women’s description of what happened to her during sex with Bauer. The woman accused Bauer of strangled her 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 woman continued 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. Meyer asked about the text message she sent to her cousin after the second encounter, in which she stated 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 about the details of what took place during her second encounter with the pitcher. She 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 like a sl*t. And I didn’t want this story anywhere. I didn’t. I was so embarrassed about all of it.”
Day three of the civil suit will continue on Wednesday with additional witnesses.
