The ugly saga of Trevor Bauer and Lindsey Hill continues, reminding America that the culture around casual hookups is a factory for conflict, pain and unhappiness.
Hill accused Bauer of sexual assault; this cost him a record 324-game suspension from his spot as a pitcher for the LA Dodgers.
No criminal charges were ever filed; the two sued each other and fought out their claims in a behind-the-scenes legal battle for years.
Now the case has been settled with no money changing hands, and Bauer has debuted evidence that seriously undermines Hill’s claims, including a text message where she refers to him as her “next victim” and a video showing her smiling and unharmed right after the alleged assault took place.
Even in the most charitable interpretation of Hill’s actions, she seems utterly lost.
And the straightforward one — that she picked Bauer out due to his status and wealth and brutally victimized him while being egged on by her friends — could only take place in a world with no meaningful moral guidelines or taboos.
That’s the result of 1) the generational effort to grind down, in the name of their greater autonomy, many of the social protections young women once enjoyed, and 2) the generational effort to glorify casual sex for young men and women.
It’s also symptomatic of the larger relativism that’s been poisoning us since the late 1960s, a drive to brand feelings of guilt and shame as inherently bad.
Yet a curious censoriousness is in play here: Note that all it took for Bauer to lose the career he had earned via years of hard work was a few allegations.
That’s the result of #MeToo “principles” that presume all men guilty until proven innocent — an attitude that, however wrong-headed, arose because so many horrible men, especially powerful ones, got away with vile behavior for so long.
When the police failed to file charges, was Bauer resuspended?
No, plainly because Major League Baseball was too cowed by fear of woke wrath.
Did journalists rush to get to the truth of what happened? No: Legacy media rushed to condemn Bauer.
One reporter, Molly Knight (formerly of New York Times-owned The Athletic), stands accused of knowingly sharing false accusations about the pitcher.
The traditional rules around sex and love were surely imperfect, but at least they were rooted in an understanding of the profound power of these forces, of the emotional, physical and even spiritual stakes.
Toss all that out in the name of a false concept of freedom without consequences, outsource what passes for moral thinking and judgment to institutions obsessed only with their own bottom lines, and you guarantee a world of hurt.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
