The woman who accused former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer of sexual assault has spoken out after he broke his silence to address the saga earlier this week.
Mr Bauer posted a video about the allegations after reaching a settlement agreement with Lindsey Hill. The pair had filed lawsuits against each other after prosecutors declined to bring charges against Mr Bauer. No money changed hands in the settlement.
In the social media video, the former Dodger read texts from Ms Hill, seemingly painting her claims as a method for her to get money from him.
“‘Next victim. Star pitcher for the Dodgers,’” Mr Bauer said, allegedly quoting his accuser. “A text Lindsey Hill sent to a friend before she ever even met me. ‘What should I steal?’ she asked another, in reference to visiting my house for the first time. The answer? ‘Take his money.’”
Ms Hill responded to his video in an interview on “Prime Time with Alex Stein,” where the host asked her to explain the messages, saying, “Those texts are bad though, Lindsey.”
Ms Hill conceded that “victim” was not the best choice of word to use. She said she used the term jokingly, as she has “been involved with other baseball players”.
She continued, “That was my world at the time and I had already dated baseball players and it was a funny, sarcastic way to say, ‘Here’s the next one I’m going to try to get attention from,’ and it was a lot of ego and attention-seeking behaviour, which is what I can own and what he can’t do is own any part. I can totally own the attention-seeking behaviour but these texts in the grand scheme don’t address what happened at all. This was before any of our interactions or anything like that.”
She said that Mr Bauer read certain messages at random, accusing him of picking “three or four texts” randomly and weaving them “into a narrative where I just look horrible.” Ms Hill also emphasised that the messages were private texts to friends.
Ms Hill accused Mr Bauer of sexual battery in 2021. After those accusations went public, the MLB player then filed a defamation suit against her; she filed a counterclaim of sexual battery.
In his video this week, Mr Bauer also cut to a clip after the alleged sexual encounter in 2021 in which Ms Hill was smiling and there were no visible bruises. Ms Hill defended that clip in her interview.
“I did not make up an accusation about what he did to me,” Ms Hill later said, saying she has photos and phone records to support her claim. She said 20 minutes after seeing Mr Bauer, she got into her car and took selfies of her face, in which “you can see the bruises just starting, and the scratching and all of that stuff,” while pointing under her eyes. She added that her team shared metadata from her photos in order to prove they had not been filtered or altered in any way.
Asked how she feels about people calling her a liar, she said: “I’m pretty numb to it at this point.” Ms Hill implored her detractors to “do some digging into” the case and claimed that “there’s a lot of this that was labelled confidential.”
“I was more than willing to go to trial, more than confident in what that would have portrayed and revealed on a public scale,” Ms Hill said. “Especially over the last year or so I have completely crumbled and my soul has been crushed by litigation… and I just made the decision that nothing is worth public vindication or anything” compared to “what I was going through and feeling at the moment.”
She continued, “I just had to make that decision that my mental health and my healing is more important to me than getting every single thing public and bringing the truth to the situation.”
The settlement agreement stipulates that both parties will pay their own attorneys’ fees, as neither are paying to settle the case. Ms Hill received a separate $300,000 from her insurance company, and “based on that payment, Lindsey agreed to settle the lawsuit,” her lawyer told The Independent. “Now that the lawsuit is over, Lindsey looks forward to helping others.”
In the same vein, Mr Bauer’s lawyers said in a statement that the athlete plans to move on from the lawsuit: “With this matter now at rest, Mr Bauer can focus completely on baseball.”
