This week, former Los Angeles Dodgers athlete Yasiel Puig has come forward to dispute claims that he sexually assaulted a woman at the Staples Center back in 2018.
Wednesday, Puig released a statement addressing allegations made against him by an anonymous woman in an October 2020 civil lawsuit. Although his lawyers denied the claims in the lawsuit at the time, this is the athlete’s first time publicly addressing the case.
“Let me be clear and set the record straight once and for all: These allegations are totally false, the evidence proves they are false, and I look forward to all the facts and the truth coming out,” Puig said.
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“The fact is I had consensual sex with a woman I met at a Lakers game after she propositioned me. Afterward, we talked about going out together, but she said she did not want her fiancé to find out,” he explained. “We messaged each other afterward and planned to get together again, but never did. She’s now suing me based on completely made-up allegations.”
His anonymous accuser – identified as Jane Roe in the lawsuit – alleges that in October 2018 she first met Puig briefly in a VIP lounge at a Lakers game and then was assaulted by him in a Staples Center bathroom.
As previously reported by Deadline, Roe claims she was “forced into a bathroom and Yasiel Puig grabbed at her trying to take her clothes off, touched her sexual organs during this struggle, and eventually pinned her with 1 arm and used his other to stroke his own penis, exposing himself, and eventually ejaculating.”
Roe also noted that at the time of the alleged assault, she “was in complete shock because it all happened so fast.”
“It was terrifying and humiliating and I don’t want anyone else to have to suffer the same kind of trauma that I’m experiencing,” she said.
But in this week’s press release Puig’s lawyers said that Roe was the one who “sought out Mr. Puig in person at the Chairman’s Club and asked him to go into a bathroom with her for a consensual sexual encounter.”
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The same day, Roe’s attorney, Taylor Rayfield, countered with a statement obtained by PEOPLE asserting that “the simple fact of the matter is that our client never engaged in consensual sexual activity with Mr. Puig—not at the Staples Center Chairman’s Club, and not anywhere else.”
Rayfield also claims the woman only exchanged information with Puig “for business purposes.” He addressed the two-year gap between the alleged attack and the filing, revealing, “the truth is that our client retained us within a year of the attack and did not file the case earlier because Puig’s attorneys asked us not to file.”
Through Rayfield, the accuser also added a bombshell about her sexuality that throws a wrench in Puigs’s defense.
“I am an out and proud lesbian and have been during my entire adult life,” said Roe. “My female fiancée and I were enjoying a Lakers game at the Staples Center when this attack occurred. The notion that I would leave my fiancé, and run off into a bathroom, so someone I did not know could do this to me, or do something worse, is demeaning and ridiculous.”
Puig, 30, signed a seven-year, $42 million contract to play for the Dodgers in 2013. He then played for the Cincinnati Reds and Cleveland Indians. He is now a free agent.
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