ESPN is reporting that baseball superstar Wander Franco of the Tampa Bay Rays has been charged with crimes involving inappropriate and illegal intimate exploitation of a minor.
The charges have been a long time coming, as Franco was placed on administrative leave due to the investigation into the matter when allegations first surfaced in the summer of last year. Though he is suspended from game play, he is still drawing his $2 million salary. His current contract expires in 2032 and he is reportedly still owed upwards of $172 million.
The baseball star is said to have paid the mother of his fourteen year-old concubine several thousand dollars to consent to the arrangement.
The deadline for filing charges against the baseball star in the Dominican Republic—Franco’s native country and the domicile of the victim—arrives on July 14. The process has been completed on time, so the baseball star will now face trial on his home soil.
Franco served a brief stint in jail earlier this year when he was detained for a week after failing to respond to prosecutorial summons on charges of money laundering and exploitation. Then, in April, a Dominican Republic judge denied a petition that Franco made to the court requesting an end to his mandatory monthly check-in with supervisors assigned to his case. A request to return his $35,000 in bail money was also denied.
Prosecutors have put forward allegations, buttressed by the testimony of the girl and members of her family, that Franco essentially purchased the fourteen year-old’s services from her mother by a combination of gifts and cash bribes. They also accuse Franco of taking the girl away from her family for a period of four months in order to conduct the relationships.
This conduct violates the Domincan Republic’s Law 136-03, a section of the legal code dedicated to protecting children and adolescents from this sort of exploitation. It considers any intimate relationship between a minor adolescent and someone five years or more their senior to be presumptively criminal.
