Baseball legend Pete Rose has been accused of statutory rape by an unnamed woman who claims to have had a sexual relationship with Rose in the 1970s when she was just 14 or 15 years old.
According to ESPN, in the majority of states, including Ohio, where both the woman and Rose lived at the time, 16 is the age of legal consent, so her allegation amounts to statutory rape.
The woman’s claims were submitted by defense attorneys in a defamation lawsuit Rose filed last year against John Dowd, a well-known Washington lawyer.
Rose sued Dowd for defamation a year ago because Dowd, in a 2015 radio interview, claimed that Rose had underage girls delivered to him at spring training. In other words, all of these disturbing details are now coming out because of Rose's lawsuit against Dowd.
Per the Mercury News,
“Sometime after that, Pete Rose and I began meeting at a house in Cincinnati,” the woman said. “It was at that house where, before my sixteenth birthday, Pete Rose began a sexual relationship with me.”
“This sexual relationship lasted for several years,” she said. “Pete Rose also met me in locations outside of Ohio where we had sex.”
Rose reportedly acknowledged that he had sex with the woman, but claimed, “based upon my information and belief at that time, she was sixteen.”
Rose, MLB's all-time hits leader who was banned from the game for life in 1989 after an investigation led by Dowd, is set to be inducted into the Philadelphia Phillies' Wall of Fame on August 12th.