[darwinbulldog]

From the Philadelphia Inquirer article:

"The biggest reason for the uproar over Rose’s return to the field in Philadelphia had less to do with his ban for gambling and more to do with the accusations of statutory rape that surfaced as part of testimony in federal court in 2017. That testimony only surfaced because Rose had filed a defamation suit against Dowd in 2015 following an interview on WCHE-AM (1520) in West Chester in which Dowd said a former associate of Rose told him that Rose had sex with underage girls “ages 12 to 14.”

“Michael Bertolini, you know, told us that he not only ran bets but he ran young girls for him down at spring training, ages 12 to 14,” Dowd said. “Isn’t that lovely? So that’s statutory rape every time you do that.”

Rose denied the allegations, adding that Dowd’s remarks were “entirely false in every respect.”

But as part of the defamation suit that followed against Dowd, new testimony suggested that Rose had a years-long relationship with an underage girl in Cincinnati during the 1970s after first meeting in 1973.

“Sometime after that, Pete Rose and I began meeting at a house in Cincinnati,” the woman said in a statement first obtained by ESPN. “It was at that house where, before my 16th 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.”

Rose admitted in court filings that he had sex with the woman in question but believed that she was 16 at the time their relationship began “sometime in 1975,” when Rose was 34 years old and married with two children.

Because of the statute of limitations, Rose could not be charged with a crime."