Woman Claims Pete Rose Had Sex With Her Before She Turned 16

Pete Rose photo via Wikimedia Commons

Last year, Philadelphia Phillies legend Pete Rose sued attorney John Dowd for statements Dowd made suggesting that Rose had had sex with underaged girls, an accusation that Rose has denied. And now, Dowd’s attorney has produced a signed declaration from one woman who alleges that Rose had sex with her when she was a minor and he was in his mid-30s.

The document turned up in federal court on Monday as an exhibit attached to a motion filed by Dowd’s Philadelphia attorneys at Pepper Hamilton. The declaration is dated February 7, 2017, and all personal information about the woman has been redacted to protect her identity.

Here is part of her statement:

In 1973, when I was 14 or 15 years old, I received a phone call from Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds.

Sometime after that, Pete Rose and I began meeting at a house in Cincinnati. 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.

Pete Rose also met me in locations outside of Ohio where we had sex.

In another document submitted to the court on Monday, Rose says that he did have a sexual relationship with her but that it didn’t start until she was 16. He also says they never had sex outside of the Cincinnati area. The age of consent in Ohio is 16.

In case the name John Dowd sounds familiar to you, this is probably because Dowd is the guy who got Rose thrown out of Major League Baseball. It was Dowd’s investigation into Rose’s betting habits that led to Rose being banned from the game in 1989.

Rose’s suit contends that Dowd went on the radio in 2015 to talk about a man named Michael Bertolini, who allegedly told Dowd that he had provided 12- to 14-year-old girls to Rose in Florida.

“Isn’t that lovely,” Dowd said on a Philadelphia-area AM broadcast, according to the suit. “So that’s statutory rape every time you do that.”

A representative of Bertolini later issued a statement saying that everything that Dowd said was a bunch of B.S.

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