The path to "Jane Doe's" statutory rape accusation against Pete Rose is a roundabout one: In 2016, Rose sued John Dowd—the lawyer whose late 1980s gambling investigation helped bring down the baseball star—over defamation. The root of it, reports the Cincinnati Enquirer, was a 2015 radio interview in which Dowd accused Rose of raping 12- to 14-year-olds, whom Rose allegedly had sent to him at spring training camp. As part of that case comes the specific rape allegation, which was part of a motion filed Monday by Dowd's lawyers. Per the filing, the woman alleges the then-married Rose himself called her in 1973, when she was 14 or 15, and they started to meet at a Cincinnati home. "It was at that house where, before my sixteenth birthday, Pete Rose began a sexual relationship with me."
Her sworn testimony goes on to say they continued the relationship for years, and that the sex occurred outside Ohio as well. The Enquirer notes the filing contains a written statement in which Rose himself confirms the affair, but he dates it to 1975, and says he thought the girl was well over 16—the age of consent in Ohio. ESPN notes that the statute of limitations has long passed, so no criminal charges would come out of this. But what Dowd's lawyers are hoping results is that the judge will force Rose to answer questions he has declined to respond, citing his right to privacy. They reportedly touch on whether he had sex with other teens. (More Pete Rose stories.)
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