A former sportswriter claims she was raped by a Major League Baseball player 18 years ago but never reported the attack because “I knew that if I told anyone what happened that it would ruin my career.”
Kat O’Brien declined to name the athlete in an emotional column that appeared Sunday in The New York Times, which ran with the headline “I am breaking my silence about the baseball player who raped me.”
The alleged sexual assault happened in 2002 when O’Brien was 22 years old and covering the Texas Rangers as a reporter for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
She said she was sitting in a hotel room interviewing the athlete for a story about foreign-born baseball players adapting to life in the U.S. when “he moved suddenly to kiss me.”
“I said, no, no, I don’t want that, but he pushed me over to the bed. I tried to shove him. I said no, stop, no, stop, over and over,” O’Brien wrote. “He pushed further, getting on top of me, pulling off my skirt, and having sex with me against my will.”
Although O’Brien did not name her attacker, she clarified the man was not a member of the Rangers team.
In Sunday’s column, O’Brien said she blamed herself for what happened and for years feared the public finding out about it.
O’Brien said the man continued to play in the majors, and that she avoided assignments that would have forced her to come face-to-face with him again.
“Soon after the assault, I was back at the ballpark in Arlington, in the visiting team’s clubhouse,” O’Brien wrote. “An All-Star player stared at me, saying my name and the name of his teammate, the man who had raped me.
“Suddenly I realized he must have told people, making himself out to be a stud and me some girl who was there to pick up ball players instead of do my job. I felt humiliated and ashamed. The player who had raped me never said another word to me.”
O’Brien said she finally summoned the courage to open up about her experience in January, when former New York Mets general manager Jared Porter was fired after he admitted to sending sexually explicit texts to a reporter while a member of the Chicago Cubs front office in 2016.
After 18 years of silence, O’Brien still does not want to reveal the alleged rapist’s name to avoid “the possibility of having dirt thrown on my reputation” and in the interest of helping “bring about systemic change rather than seek unlikely-to-come justice for one horrible act.”
O’Brien is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. After leaving the Star-Telegram, she covered the New York Yankees for Newsday.
“I had experienced the worst kind of assault, yet a quieter, still uncomfortable strain of harassment persists for women journalists working in sports locker rooms, and women who work in other rooms dominated by men,” O’Brien wrote, adding that she endured blatant sexism and hostile rumors during her tenure as a sports reporter.
“I hope that by sharing my experiences, more women will feel comfortable speaking up when something is inappropriate,” O’Brien wrote.
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