LOS ANGELES — The video lasts nine seconds, with no sound. Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer appears to be asleep in bed, with a mask over his eyes. Next to him in bed, his attorneys say: the woman whose sexual assault allegations against Bauer triggered the investigation that resulted in his two-year suspension from Major League Baseball.
The woman took the video herself, according to attorneys for Bauer. On Tuesday night, in asking a federal court to throw out the woman's claim against Bauer for sexual battery, the attorneys included in their court filing a video they said was obtained from the Pasadena Police Department and taken at Bauer's home after he allegedly injured her during a sexual encounter on May 16, 2021.
"She appears to be willingly in bed with a sleeping Mr. Bauer, and is smirking and uninjured," the attorneys wrote. In the video, no facial injuries are apparent.
In denying the woman a restraining order against Bauer, a judge last year said the woman was "not ambiguous about wanting rough sex in the parties' first encounter and wanting rougher sex in the second encounter." Yet the judge also said the woman's "injuries as shown in the photographs are terrible."
Bauer previously had said in court filings that "the pictures did not reflect what she looked like when she left" his house that day, but the video is the first evidence in support of that allegation.
In the woman's claim, her attorneys said Bauer had discussed the incident in a call taped by police and "did not dispute that he had punched Hill and that doing so resulted in black eyes."
The woman's attorneys also said Bauer had punched her in the buttocks, vagina and groin, areas not shown in the video. The woman was examined in a hospital later that day, where she was diagnosed with "acute head injury" and "assault by manual strangulation."
Attorneys for the woman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Los Angeles County district attorney declined to charge Bauer with a crime, saying the assault charges could not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
Bauer is suing the woman for defamation. He is appealing his suspension, but an arbitrator's decision on whether to sustain, reduce or overturn the suspension is not expected until after the World Series.
