By: Ellen Cans
A former New York sportswriter revealed in an emotional essay how she was raped by a Major League Baseball player, getting an interview 18 years ago in a hotel room. Kat O’Brien said in the column featured in Sunday’s New York Times, that she had been 22 when she interviewed an unnamed MLB player for a story. He “moved suddenly to kiss me,” she wrote. “I said, no, no, I don’t want that, but he pushed me over to the bed,’’ said O’Brien, a former Newsday reporter who was working with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas at that time.
“I tried to shove him,’’ she continued. “I said no, stop, no, stop, over and over. He pushed further, getting on top of me, pulling off my skirt, and having sex with me against my will.” As per the NY Post, O’Brien, a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, said she never reported the 2002 attack because “I knew that if I told anyone what happened that it would ruin my career.”
“I was 22 with no track record, and at that time — nearly two decades ago — most people in baseball would have rallied to protect the athlete. So I blamed myself,” she wrote. “I must have been too nice, too trusting, too friendly and open. Even though I said no, it must have been a misunderstanding.”
After being raped that night, the former reporter said, she didn’t apply for jobs in cities which played against the team her rapist played for. She also avoided higher-profile jobs, worried that the story would get out and it would tarnish her reputation, not his. “Even all these years later and in the wake of the #MeToo movement, a former professional athlete wields considerable power,” she wrote in the explosive column, explaining why she chose not to name her assaulter.
“I hope I can help bring about systemic change rather than seek unlikely-to-come justice for one horrible act.”
O’Brien said she finally opened up about her experience after hearing in January that New York Mets general manager Jared Porter was fired for sexting a female reporter.
“I hadn’t been a sports reporter in 11 years, but as I read accounts of other women’s experiences with sexual harassment, the full force of my own assault hit me,” she wrote. “And with it came the relief that I actually hadn’t invited it, hadn’t done anything wrong at all, something I had never once considered.”
