There seems to be a lot of speculation, and very little reliable information. There's been a lot of smoke around the victim's mom, suggesting she may have been either pimping out her daughter and/or blackmailing Franco for money/cars.
There's some tweeting from credible sources that the girl is 15 now. Which means this happened a year ago. Which means he was 21 at the time she was 14.
And I have a feeling it will keep getting worse. The Rays may be cheap, but paying for a handful of investigators to travel to the DR will be a large multiple cheaper than paying the remainder of Franco's contract. The worst thing that could happen is you just KNOW the guy did something, but it wasn't prosecuted and the team has to cut the player but pay out the remaining money. The Rays and the MLB executive office are going to turn every stone to make sure they don't have to pay $150+ million to someone this toxic.
From what I can read, it seems that it was either hush money or blackmail money since the tweet says this happened after he had relations with the victim.
Laws have changed quite a bit. Almost every payment that is not fully declared and detailed gets filed under money laundering and most financial entities/authorities work on a “guilty until proven innocent” basis. Under pressure from the US (which can easily cripple a bank by denying corresponding services) banks all over Latin America are taking compliance to another level. I work in a field where we receive lots of transfers from abroad and there are times the bank requests every little detail of a transaction and its sender before it will release the money. All under this assumption.
The only possible way this goes away is if he can prove that he had nothing to do with her. And it doesn’t look like he can (and yeah we have crossed the line where he now has to prove it IMO at least to MLB, to be viable).
Well, social and criminal issues are held to different standards.
100,000 Dominican pesos is approximately $1700 USD. Pocket change to him, possibly life changing for them, disgusting regardless.
That’s my point. He is done with MLB unless he can find a way to probe he had nothing to do, and whatever the Court System there does, it’s not looking good in that regard. And I am aware that the standard is different.
I was going to say that. It may not sound much when you do dollars but depending on where they live this is a lot of money.
Based on lots of Dominican twitter speculation, some of which seems to be proving somewhat accurate with the charges against the girl’s mother, guessing he’s going to claim he didn’t know she was underage—that this was a full-on set-up for extortion purposes and she met him at a club or other “adult” type of place and portrayed herself as being of age. I’m assuming that wouldn’t fly in the US, although you would know that much better than me, but I have no idea how Dominican law would treat something like that.
I am equally ignorant re: Dominican law. As a criminal defense, that wouldn't work in the US. Here, the mother could also be charged with extortion or child endangerment or human trafficking, depending on the facts. Sometimes there are two bad actors. It might be possible for the lesser of the two to leverage their cooperation into a good deal, should the prosecution wish to go after the more culpable figure. . .but in the broadest sense, "I didn't know she was underage" is not a defense you can present to a jury.
He may be done in MLB, but how this plays out will impact his contract status with the Rays, I think. If he gets convicted and sent to prison, I assume the Rays won’t have to pay him, at least while he’s in prison. Can they void the contract, though? If he gets sent away for 5 years, do they have to pay the next 5 years of the contract once he’s out? As a convicted sex offender would he be banned from entering the US, which would get them off the hook? What if he somehow is acquitted or charges are dropped? Given that this is the DR, wouldn’t be shocking if the right people get greased and somehow this all disappears or he gets a slap on the wrist. Does MLB step in and ban him under the league’s child abuse policy? Do the Rays/MLB have to effectively serve as the prosecution here if the DR fails to do so? Is the MLBPA going to go to the mat to prevent his contract from being voided (most likely yes).
Total guess, but Wander could have laundered the money for BadMom. Like if he paid in such a way as to make it look like BadMom was legally earning the hush/access money.
This could play out in many different ways, of course, but the bottom line is that MLB contracts are famously sticky.
That was my thought as well: the Bauer payout was "only money" to the Dodgers to make the issue go away from their four walls, but paying an empty $25 million/year from 2027-2033 for an effectively exiled player would be far more destructive to the Rays franchise. They really need a conviction to stick in this case.
The Rays will go scorched earth not to pay this. It’s like if the Sox had signed Yamamoto to a $300m contract and then he and Devers both got arrested and the Sox had to eat both contracts simultaneously.
Seems highly unlikely that a direct quote from a conversation between a minor and a therapist would be made public, but stranger things have happened.
I haven't looked this up lately, but this is also my understanding of when players get paid.
Absolutely, will look into some Dominican articles some time today to get more details (of the accusation itself).
Virtually any payment that he made to her without enough details could be characterized as money laundering under the current laws passed in different countries (at the behest of the US). So if I pay my plumber in cash or directly to him without a supporting invoice for whatever work he did in my house (not an uncommon practice) and it's a sufficiently large amount of money, both of our accounts could be flagged under money laundering laws.
The reporting is that this was presented in court as part of the indictment or whatever DR judicial process was happening. Hector Gomez is pretty reliable on this stuff and is putting the same thing out there.
This is being confirmed all over the place today. Here’s an article (en espanol) with a bunch of details and some of the timeline of the investigation. Girl was pissed that the mother was keeping all the money for herself so she outed Wander on social media.
Out of MLB. The only question would seem to be whether the Rays can get out of the contract.
Which is likely only a question if he's acquitted or somehow charges are dropped. I would expect his arrest and having to stay in the D.R. for the legal process would allow the Rays to place him on the restricted list (no pay) rather than administrative leave for the duration. A conviction probably gives them grounds to void the contract, but if not, the restricted list while he serves time accomplishes more or less the same thing. Perhaps if his sentence runs out before his contract expires, MLB can step in and suspend him for the remainder.
MLB could give him a lifetime ban and that would get the Rays off the hook. I haven’t seen anything about how much jail time he might be facing, but he’s got 10 years left on his contract and it’s backloaded, so even if he got sent away for 3-4 years, he could in theory still be out and able to report to work to collect a huge chunk of change. In the past, felony convictions haven’t gotten teams out of contracts, so this could be a case to try to explore whether there is any level of misconduct that would overcome precedent.
We know that many/most MLB contracts have various clauses where certain activities can cause a contract to become voided. I'll go out on a limb and suggest that the sort of behavior that Franco's being accused of should be on that list.
Holy crap that article is ugly and creepy.
During a follow-up interview with the forensic psychologist from Inacif, the teenager confessed that Wander Franco"who is my ex-boyfriend, gave a car to my mother because he wanted to fix the emeotional damage he caused her at some time when he took me out of her house without her consent one night. That was on Dec 9 of last year (2022)
Other articles from the same source have the following allegations:
Are we sure of another victim as this point and if that mother was an active participant?
Not hard to imagine given the level of poverty there and in the country that it shares an island with, Haiti.
