Orf vs. the Memory Hole: The Trevor Bauer Controversy

A controversial and unpopular baseball player is accused of savage behavior, spurring instantaneous calls for banishment. A few years of legal process later, it appears the gun was jumped

Two years ago, then-LA Dodgers pitcher and reigning Cy Young award winner Trevor Bauer was placed on administrative leave by Major League Baseball, in the wake of sexual assault allegations inevitably described as graphic. Baseball fans and non-fans alike were told about him “punching and choking [a woman] during sex without consent,” leaving “bruises on the woman’s face and blood in her eye.” The episode was seen as so terrible that it made a kind of editorial sense when, in the summer of 2021, MSNBC followed a segment on Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein with one on Bauer.