The Washington Post is reporting that back in February of 2015 a then 17-year-old girl emailed Gabe Kapler, who was the director of player development for the Dodgers, about an assault that took place involving two minor league players.
The girl claimed that she partied with two Dodgers minor leaguers and two other women near the Dodgers spring training complex. She got drunk, was sexually assaulted, threw up and was videotaped by one of the players getting beat up by the two women.
Kapler and the Dodgers never reported the incident to the police.
After consuming about half the bottle, the girl wrote, she vomited on the bed, angering the two women, who threw her out of the room, kicking and punching her in the process. Rather than come to her aid, according to the girl, one of the Dodgers players videotaped the beating on his phone, and then posted the video on Snapchat.
“The boys got me drunk and the girls beat me up,” she wrote. “Your player . . . videotaped it all.”
Kapler didn’t contact police, records show, nor did others with the Dodgers he consulted. Instead, Kapler tried to arrange a dinner with the girl and the players, and engaged in discussions with the girl’s grandmother.
The next week, the girl’s case manager with Arizona’s Department of Child Safety contacted police. When officers interviewed the girl hours later, according to the report, she offered an even darker account of the evening: Before the beating, the girl told police, one of the Dodgers players had sexually assaulted her as she lay on the bed, struggling to remain conscious.
Expect Major League Baseball to take a look at this and hand down some sort of punishment to the Dodgers organization.
This is a bad look for the Dodgers. You can’t as an organization fail to report an assault like this. Kapler should have known better, but from the sound of it he was following the lead of the organization.
We’d love to know who the two players involved were. They must have been two of their top guys if they didn’t want this to get out.
