I wonder what happens if it is arguably legal in the DR but not here. Do we play cultural relativism with statutory rape?
Wander Franco Is In Trouble (Grooming/Pedo Warning)
- Thread starter Wingack
- Start date
This is the tricky part.
If a 18-19 year old athlete starts dating someone who looks and says they are 18 how much proof of age does he ask?
Especially if her parents say so as well.
Add to that the whole shenanigans we have seen from DR born players regarding age (I guess ease of obtaining fake documents) and everything gets really murky.
We may never know the full story.
As long as we're purely speculating:
There was a commenter in the reddit thread that stated the (then) 14 year old had a lot of pictures up on Instagram, but has since wiped them. One of them was of the Wander photo, and on it the mother had commented, requesting $200K and a car from him.
Again, THAT IS SPECULATION AS I COULDNT CONFIRM IT. I went to verify this on my own, but the woman's Instagram page was - as the redditor mentioned - almost empty other than a few pictures. She only follows 70ish people, about a dozen of which are Dominican ball players and the MLBPA.
The reason I mention this is because IF true, you'd assume it would be something the police/league/whomever would be aware of prior to a random redditor.
I fucking HATE these types of situations. No winners, only losers.
This is still pretty fresh, so alot of speculation out there. I've seen claims the girl is 14 and some claim 18 with a baby.
One of the first things I saw was she was 14 with a baby, so who knows what's true? No sense dragging anyone through the mud with limited information.
Not sure if I'm concerned that there are websites like this, but according to AgeOfConsent.com, there is no Romeo & Juliet exception in the DR.
https://www.ageofconsent.net/world/dominican-republic#:~:text=Dominican Republic statutory rape law,close-in-age exemption.
Also:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110228145630/http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2009/wha/136110.htm
Didn't find anything one way or the other on strict liability on quick search.
It's not her age today that matters so much. It's her age when she had the relationship with Wander.
I think there's some pretty convincing arguments that some of the pictures can "date" Wander re: his tattoos. But those might have been taken early or late in the relationship.
It's been really hard to get good information on all of this. You can start going down rabbit holes online (i started to even in like 15-20 minutes of digging)....many who claim to be from the Dominican say she is 19 or 20 (maybe a year or two younger at time of pic?) and others claim that she was in fact underage, but Wander didn't have any relationship with her outside of friends/family gatherings and that the pic was taken out of context deliberately to extort him.
But there's a serious lack of anything reliable, and I still think it's bad to make any assumptions in either direction. I also don't think Wander agreeing to be on the restricted list for 6 games is necessarily indicative of much either. I think the situation still looks bad for him, but there is still much to be determined before we conclude for sure.
To be a touch more clear, "strict liability" is not the proper term if you want to search for it (although it's sometimes used as a shorthand.)
What we're talking about here is if the DR allows a defense of mistaken fact in these situations. Can Wander say, "I knowingly slept with her, but I was credibly misled about her age" and so escape criminal liability? Or is being misled just not a factor?
(Generally speaking, the US does not allow this as a defense.)
A second issue is, "does parental permission allow this?" Like, was this a "DR common law marriage" followed by a "DR common law divorce"? If such things even exist. On a first impression with partial facts, that seems like a heck of a stretch.
Let's say this is a catfishing type thing to extort money. IE Wander is a bit of a victim here as well. I wonder how MLB would handle punishment. I can't recall something similar taking place any recent time.
Agreed - I'm still at the logical framing stage; things like their ages at the time of the relationship and the type of relationship matter. So whatever her current age is might be suggestive, but it's certainly not dispositive of anything.
Does anybody know what the league policy is for this?
I mean, I'd assume it gets "automatically" triggered if there's a public arrest for DV. And I'd assume it does not if some kind of minimum threshold of credibility isn't reached. Like if there was a random 4chan post claiming some player is a dog abuser.
It's a good example of R&J exceptions for the thread. What I should have typed is "I don't know if the DR has them." Casual internet consensus seems to be "no."
Yeah, not my area of law, but I get it.
Was looking at some of the source material & Google translating it, but got tired of that rabbit hole & I'm sure the process will work out however it works out.
If they had a physical relationship while she was underage I can’t imagine his reasonable beliefs are relevant to punishment. It’s not for courts, and it would allow people to avoid statutory rape charges with some made up docs.
Twitter has some gems on this whole thing. In addition to the usual memes:
Deleted on request of a fellow poster.
Deleted on request of a fellow poster.
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He is easily a top five current player in terms of speculative baseball card value. Imagine how much is being lost there if the worst outcomes prevail?
My wife and I watched this a few weeks back
The Curious Case of Natalia Grace (TV Mini Series 2023) - IMDb
It's apples to oranges, but the series centers on trying to nail down a young woman's age, with a wide range of possibilites (like an 8 year swing based on what 'evidence' you chose to believe), all with significant legal ramifications.
I'm guessing this will be much different but I was reminded of it a little
The Curious Case of Natalia Grace (TV Mini Series 2023) - IMDb
It's apples to oranges, but the series centers on trying to nail down a young woman's age, with a wide range of possibilites (like an 8 year swing based on what 'evidence' you chose to believe), all with significant legal ramifications.
I'm guessing this will be much different but I was reminded of it a little
I was surprised to see some comment from someone who claimed to own a Franco card worth 13k, which is far more than I would’ve thought modern cards could reach.
He got pulled in the middle of the 5th the other day. So something MLB must have learned just that night I would guess.
"Gems" about possible (and this goes that far) statutory rape don't belong here.
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I'm happy to remove it, but completely honest question - what about this offends you?
(I had thought it was non-offensive and fairly far afield of the actual subject matter, as it's making of of analytics.)
Any joke about any type of rape doesn't belong here. It isn't about being offended. Would you like your (hypothetical?) daughter to be the subject of these jokes? Here, on SoSH?
Fair point. (Perhaps I should have asked, "what about this is offensive?" I didn't mean to imply this was only about you, personally.)
Shouldn't this be in V&N? It's hard to work out the mods' strike zone but "zero tolerance keep non-sports stuff out of sports (unless it's Ben Rapistburger references)" seems to be sorta kinda of how it works.
Or does each sport's forum (NFL vs. MLB etc) have different house rules and edge cases?
Or does each sport's forum (NFL vs. MLB etc) have different house rules and edge cases?
Might be normal in other cultures actually? Us (mostly) white guys might not know all the angles here. I have to guess we don't know her identity so I wouldn't make assumptions about this. Also how long had he lived in the US when they met? Who knows what a young kid in a foreign country might be capable of judging. If he was duped into this, there are potentially a bunch of reasons.
If he had some idea or should have known, then I don't want to sound like I am excusing this. Also don't the Rays train young players about this stuff? Especially foreign kids who might not know and whose parents are far away. They HAVE to teach them about the laws.
There are a lot of threads that have straddled the line over the years, and not all non-sports content is created equal. Personal behavior is not in and of itself politics. Threads about Kobe, Antonio Brown, and many others have stayed in their respective forums, and that's always preferable IMO, even if some mild intervention happens from time to time. Hopefully this thread can stay here.
Now, if the thread's about an athlete that spews politics a la Schilling et al, that's another story.
Anyway, like literally everyone else around here, I''m really hoping that this turns out to be a nothingburger.
He’s from a country and culture where there’s also an age of consent. Why are you assuming he’s a lost lamb who got duped here? I get what you’re saying, but it also seems to be making a bunch of assumptions about Franco and foreign players in general that are unintentionally insulting.
I lived in a foreign country, I can empathize with anyone doing this, especially as a teenager. I found it bewildering and I came from the rich white world. I also have a 19 year old son and feel comfortable saying they don't make the best decisions, even before you introduce millions of dollars. I don't think it's insulting to ask questions. It might not be a simple case at all, and both people have rights.
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Huh? What is bewildering about this? The picture of him kissing an obvious underage girl is bewildering? I'm not understanding what you mean.
It sounds more like an issue with statutory rape being strict liability, which isn’t necessarily a terrible discussion, but a guy coming from a country with similar laws whose dad played ball in the US probably wasn’t confused as to the age of consent being 14 in either country.
I haven’t been around many 14 year olds. If they were in an ongoing relationship, I’d assume you’d have to be pretty willfully blind to not realize your gf was just starting high school.
She is obviously underage? I chose not to go digging for photos. If it's obvious, then fine, case closed. Also that wasn't the question I was originally responding to.
Yeah, OK. I can think of all sorts of reasons kids make mistakes initially, but ongoing... the chances of it being at all innocent narrow quickly.
Since when are we not allowed to discuss "non-sports stuff" in the sports forums? That happens daily. It's personal politics that rightly gets locked in V&N. I guess if some poster comes out as pro-statutory rape we'll have to move the thread.