Hall of Fame pitcher Mariano Rivera, wife added as defendants in revised sexual abuse lawsuit, documents show
USA Today Sports obtained a copy of the new complaint after it was filed in Westchester County Court April 25.
The original lawsuit, filed in January, alleged the young girl was victimized by an older individual during events linked to the church the Riveras co-founded.
The church is located in Westchester County, New York, and Clara was listed as a senior pastor.
The Riveras were not named defendants in the initial filing. Instead, the church, Refuge of Hope, and Brook View Rye, LLC were listed as defendants. The limited liability company lists the address of the Riveras' former home, which they sold in 2022.
In the previous filing, the Riveras were accused of taking inadequate measures to protect the girl listed as Jane Doe in the complaint. The complaint alleges an assault occurred in "approximately summer 2018" at a New York home the Riveras' owned at the time.
According to the lawsuit, the alleged abuse happened at a barbecue that children who attended the church were invited to. However, the attending children's parents did not receive invitations, according to the suit.
The amended suit's details were consistent with the initial filing. In both filings, the Riveras allegedly disregarded the girl's claims of sexual abuse and "isolated and intimidated" her in an effort to ensure she remained quiet about the alleged incident.
"Rather than take sufficient action to end the sexual abuse of JANE A DOE, the Riveras each separately isolated and intimidated JANE A DOE to remain silent about her abuse to avoid causing trouble for REFUGIO and the Ignite Life Summer Internship," the lawsuit states.
"In order to avoid the potential scandal of child sexual abuse in its programs and otherwise protect DEFENDANTS above all else, the Riveras, in their capacities as agents and/or employees of DEFENDANTS, assured MOTHER A DOE that JANE A DOE was safe and in no danger at Ignite Life Center, despite actual or constructive knowledge that JANE A DOE remained vulnerable to additional acts of sexual abuse."
Joseph A. Ruta, an attorney representing the Riveras, said the allegations against his clients are "completely false."
The plaintiff is seeking a jury trial and compensatory and punitive damages.
Rivera, 55, is a five-time World Series champion and a 13-time MLB All-Star. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2019.
Follow Fox News Digital's sports coverage on X, and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Times
7 hours ago
- New York Times
Yankees drafted player after he admitted he drew swastika on Jewish student's door in college. Why?
When the New York Yankees drafted University of Utah shortstop Core Jackson in the fifth round in July, they were aware that he had drawn a swastika on the dorm room door of a Jewish student in 2021, when he was a 17-year-old freshman at the University of Nebraska. Jackson voluntarily called teams to tell them about his actions before the 2024 draft. In a phone interview with The Athletic, Jackson said that he was 'blackout drunk' when he drew the swastika, and that he had no recollection of the incident or why he did it. He said he knows that he made a 'really stupid mistake,' and that he has learned and grown since that time and is no longer 'the person he was when it all happened.' Advertisement The University of Nebraska declined to discuss any specifics of the incident, and the university police did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Yankees amateur scouting director Damon Oppenheimer said the team's decision followed the most thorough 'due diligence' look into a player in his 23 years on the job, and that it was cleared directly with owner Hal Steinbrenner. The draft pick came after multiple members of the organization had conversations with Jackson and those close to him, and after discussing the situation with multiple high-ranking Jewish members of the club, including team president Randy Levine, who supported the decision to draft Jackson. The club, however, did not speak with anyone at Nebraska about the incident, according to Oppenheimer. Jackson also was charged with driving under the influence on Utah's campus in September 2024. According to his agent, Blake Corosky of True Gravity Baseball, the charge was later reduced to impaired driving, a misdemeanor. Corosky said Jackson had performed community service, received substance abuse training and paid fines. Jackson said he hasn't 'touched a drop of alcohol' in the months since. Oppenheimer said he thought the swastika incident 'affected (Jackson's) draft status' and was likely part of teams' calculus when he went undrafted in 2024. (Jackson transferred to a junior college for the 2023 season and played for Utah the past two seasons). 'I think that his tool set, his athleticism, his performance was definitely something that would have gone a lot higher in the draft,' the scouting director added. The Yankees drafted Jackson at No. 164 overall this July, signing him to a bonus of $147,500, well under the pick's $411,1000 slot value. 'I think it's important that it is part of my story,' said Jackson, now 21. 'I have this platform now that God has given me, and I can share my story about his forgiveness.' Advertisement The greater New York area was home to about 1.4 million people who identified as Jewish as of 2023, according to a study by the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York, making it the largest Jewish community in the world outside of Israel. The Yankees were 'looking to find the good in this,' Oppenheimer said. 'He's shown his accountability here,' Oppenheimer said. 'I think his actions have shown his remorse. He's acknowledged it. I think he's taken the right steps to continue to learn, to understand what he's done.' Jackson said he was so drunk the night he drew the swastika, in October 2021, that he blacked out and doesn't remember any of the incident. He claims that he didn't know who lived in the dorm room, and said that he 'broke down in tears' the next day when someone told him what he had done. 'I felt like the worst person in the world,' he said. 'I don't want there to be any excuses for my actions.' He said he wanted to apologize to the student, but that campus police told him to not contact them. He said the University of Nebraska fined him, had him undergo basic sensitivity training online and made him perform community service after the incident, but that there were 'no other repercussions.' He was not arrested, and he played on the university's baseball team the following spring. A Nebraska spokesperson declined to comment on the situation, but said that it 'takes discrimination and similar allegations very seriously and has policies and procedures in place to rapidly respond to student concerns.' The Athletic was not able to identify or speak with the victim, or to independently verify Jackson's version of events. A Freedom of Information Act request submitted to the University of Nebraska asking for documents pertaining to the incident had not received a response at the time of publication. Jackson played for the Nebraska baseball team in 2022, hitting .210 in 44 games, but left the school that summer. He described his freshman year as 'being in a dark place,' and said that he departed because he was not 'growing in my faith or getting better at baseball.' Jackson said he didn't have any Division I offers upon leaving Nebraska, so he played his sophomore year at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, hitting .321 with four homers, 33 RBIs and a .907 OPS. He was eligible for the draft in 2023 but wasn't selected, and then enrolled at the University of Utah, where in 2024 he hit .363 with four home runs, 41 RBIs and a .979 OPS as a junior. That spring, he began attracting the attention of MLB teams intrigued by his arm strength, right-handed power and athleticism. Advertisement At the end of his first interview with a Boston Red Sox scout, Jackson was asked if there was anything else he wanted to talk about. Jackson told him about the swastika incident. 'Everybody found out about it (then),' said Corosky, Jackson's agent. 'Including us.' After hearing the story from Jackson, Corosky said he considered no longer advising the shortstop. Corosky also represented Jacob Steinmetz, an Arizona Diamondbacks pitching prospect and the first practicing Orthodox Jewish player ever drafted. As a courtesy, Corosky said that he called Jacob's father, Elliot, who is the head men's basketball coach at Yeshiva University, a Division III Orthodox Jewish school in New York City. He wanted Elliot to be aware of what had happened. Corosky told Elliot Steinmetz that Jackson appeared 'extremely remorseful,' but also 'doesn't (understand) exactly what he did.' After Steinmetz's initial anger faded, he suggested that Corosky consider trying to educate Jackson about antisemitism. A few hours later, Steinmetz called Jackson. 'Right away,' he said, 'you could tell (Jackson) was the nicest, sweetest kid in the world, (but) dumb as rocks when it came to these kinds of issues.' According to Steinmetz, Jackson hadn't seemed to fully grasp the dark history behind the swastika — the symbol that represented the German Nazi Party in the 20th century and is still being used by neo-Nazis worldwide. Jackson told Steinmetz that his education on the symbol was limited. Jackson grew up in a Christian household in Wyoming, Ontario, a rural town about 30 minutes from the Michigan border, and told The Athletic that he had hardly encountered Jewish people or learned about Jewish history in school. Steinmetz had a point he wanted to impress upon Jackson. 'If I walked into a hall and saw a swastika, I'd be pissed off,' Steinmetz said. 'My grandparents would be freaked out and terrified by it.' Advertisement Corosky ultimately told Jackson he would continue advising him, but under two conditions. First, Jackson would have to call a representative from each of the 30 teams in Major League Baseball and describe what he did. He told Jackson 'not to pull any punches' no matter how difficult it was to talk about. Second, Jackson would have to work with Steinmetz on 'some intense, gut-wrenching understanding of why what he did was so hurtful and awful.' Jackson agreed. 'Obviously,' he said of calling teams to inform them, 'it wasn't easy, but it was part of growing up and understanding to take ownership of my actions.' Most scouts told Jackson they appreciated his candidness. Steinmetz reached out to the head of Holocaust studies at Yeshiva, who put him in contact with Ann Squicciarini, then a graduate student at the school. Squicciarini, who is Christian, had enrolled in Yeshiva's Holocaust education program in the wake of two Jewish students being attacked in her native Brooklyn in May 2021. Squicciarini designed a five-week course for Jackson, including video and reading assignments, and the pair met for an hour each week. Squicciarini logged everything, and sent post-session reports to Steinmetz. 'He was attentive and engaged,' Squicciarini said. Neither she nor Steinmetz were paid to work with Jackson; both said they wanted to use education to fight hate. Ari Kohen, the director of the Harris Center for Judaic Studies at Nebraska, said that it's 'absolutely crucial' for society to learn how to teach antisemitism and preach awareness of 'all forms of bigotry, truthfully, to young people today.' 'I don't feel that we have fully figured it out at this point,' said Kohen, who was at the Harris Center when Jackson drew the swastika but had not been aware of the incident before being contacted by The Athletic. 'Especially with how quickly our culture changes, thanks to social media, thanks to the meme-ification of all these things.' Advertisement It's important to try to educate someone who commits an act of hate, Kohen said. 'If we drive to punish,' he said, 'that doesn't allow us to take that teachable opportunity. There's a lot that I think we miss.' Steinmetz agreed. 'It's not redeemable if you think it's just a joke,' he said. 'It's redeemable if you do the work, take the path back (and) prove to people you're not just doing it to get a job out of it.' Oppenheimer, the Yankees' scouting director, has known Utah head coach Gary Henderson for more than 40 years. Henderson called him about Jackson in the fall of 2024 — well after the Yankees were aware of what Jackson had done. Other teams had been 'very active in trying to understand the situation,' including the Houston Astros, Toronto Blue Jays and San Diego Padres, Corosky said. Jackson worked out for the Detroit Tigers and the Yankees. Henderson told Oppenheimer that Jackson was 'really playing well' and that 'he's turned a corner. He's been a good person, a good teammate.' That's when the Yankees' conversations began. Jackson met twice with Steve Nagy, the Yankees' scout who covers Utah as part of the Four Corners region, who 'heard the story for himself,' Oppenheimer said. Oppenheimer himself talked to Corosky, and then with Jackson and Steinmetz. Oppenheimer also met via video conference call with Jackson and Yankees director of mental conditioning Chris Passarella, who signed off on the decision. Yankees national cross checker Mike Wagner, who is Jewish, met with Steinmetz. Oppenheimer met with assistant director of player development Stephen Swindal Jr., who is also Jewish, to discuss Jackson. Oppenheimer also called general manager Brian Cashman and Steinbrenner, who rarely gets involved in player selection, and arranged a conference call that Oppenheimer attended with Steinmetz and Levine. The Yankees did not speak with anyone from the University of Nebraska, according to Oppenheimer, but they felt their process was thorough. 'I don't think we've ever done this,' Oppenheimer said regarding the breadth of their inquiry into a single draftee. '(Yankees brass) has knowledge of the players we think we're going to be involved in, but not to the degree that they needed to be aware of (this) situation.' Advertisement 'I feel that moving forward,' Oppenheimer said, 'we've got a good citizen and a good person and a good baseball player.' Minutes after the Yankees drafted Jackson on July 14, he called Steinmetz. 'He was thanking me for everything I did,' Steinmetz said, 'how much it means to him, how he's not going to let me down and how he's going to get to work.' Oppenheimer said he already made the player development staff aware of Jackson's history, and that Jackson has had no issues since joining the Yankees, who quickly promoted him to High-A Hudson Valley. Jackson said he understands that people may be upset by his past. 'I would ask for their forgiveness and let them know I'm not the same person I was when that happened,' he said. 'I've grown up. I've learned. I've reconciled. I've done the things I needed to do to learn about it.' (Top photo of Core Jackson: Tyler Tate / AP Photo) Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle
NBC News
7 hours ago
- NBC News
How the NBA got rid of microbets — and why it could be a blueprint for MLB
Sixteen months after a landmark decision opened the door for legal sports gambling in the United States, a high-ranking NFL executive sat before a House committee in the fall of 2019 to ask for help banishing a particular type of bet that has drawn the ire of sports leagues across the country. Proposition bets, better known as 'prop bets,' allow wagers not on the outcomes of games but on occurrences during them. A wager could be on the result the first play of a game, the first pitch of an inning or whether a player will compile over or under a certain number of rebounds, strikeouts or rushing yards. Leagues, as the NFL indicated that day in front of lawmakers, consider such props troublesome and more easily manipulated because many hinge on the actions of just one player. 'These types of bets are significantly more susceptible to match-fixing efforts and are therefore a source of concern to sports leagues, individual teams and the athletes who compete,' NFL Executive Vice President Jocelyn Moore testified in 2019. (Moore, who has served on the board of directors of DraftKings since 2020, declined to comment.) Had you placed a bet then that prop bets would go away, you would have ended up a loser. When the NFL staged the Super Bowl between the Los Angeles Rams and the New England Patriots five months after the NFL's testimony, bettors could still choose among hundreds of prop bets. And six years later, they are still a source of headlines, concern for leagues and income for sportsbooks. In 2024, the NBA banned the Toronto Raptors' Jontay Porter for life for sports betting after an investigation found he had, among other findings, 'limited his own participation to influence the outcome of one or more bets on his performance in at least one Raptors game.' In June, reports surfaced that a federal investigation into longtime NBA guard Malik Beasley was related to activity around prop bets. 'I do think some of the bets are problematic," NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in July, the month Major League Baseball placed a Cleveland Guardians pitcher on paid leave while it investigated unusually high wagers on the first pitches of innings on June 15 and June 27, ESPN reported. Weeks later, after MLB placed a second Guardians pitcher on leave as part of a sports gambling investigation, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred told a group of baseball writers that there were 'certain types of bets that strike me as unnecessary and particularly vulnerable, things where it's one single act [and] doesn't affect the outcome, necessarily.' Whether MLB considers prop bets 'unnecessary' enough to try to have its gambling partners restrict the kinds that are offered is unclear. But if MLB does, it might look to the NBA for a possible blueprint. During the 2024-25 NBA season, the league's gambling partners including FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM and several others who make up upward of 95% of the legal U.S. sportsbooks agreed to no longer offer 'under' prop bets on players either on 10-day or two-way contracts. (Porter had been on a two-way contract.) Fans could still bet on the sport's big names, like Stephen Curry's 3-pointers or LeBron James' rebounds — but legal sports betting operators in the United States were no longer offering action on the NBA's lowest-paid players. The decision wasn't a mandate handed down solely by the NBA. 'We do not have control over the specific bets that are made on our game,' Silver said in July. Years earlier, the league had sought just that type of power, but it was unsuccessful in persuading state lawmakers to pass legislation that would have given the NBA the right to approve what types of bets could be offered on the league. It also doesn't hold veto rights over what its gambling partners can and cannot offer, according to sources with knowledge of the situation. Instead, much like the NFL's attempt in its congressional testimony six years earlier, the NBA had to ask for help. Representatives for DraftKings and FanDuel didn't respond to requests for comment on their back-and-forth with the league that led to the decisions to restrict certain prop bets. Multiple people with knowledge of the situation not authorized to speak publicly on sensitive discussions said the league had to rely on making the case to its partners that prop bets on 10-day and two-way players weren't worth the relatively small amount of business they brought in. 'It's a small part of the marketplace,' a person involved in the process said, 'but had outsized integrity risks.' Such dialogue between a league and a sportsbook would have been unthinkable before the Supreme Court's 2018 decision to overturn a federal prohibition on sports gambling freed states to decide whether to permit legal sports betting. (Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia allow sports gambling, and Missouri is set to launch its own operation in December.) Almost overnight, leagues and sportsbooks that once steered clear of one another were now in business together. Sometimes, the back-and-forth between a league and its sportsbook partners has stopped bets from appearing before they are even listed. In 2020, with leagues still months away from making a pandemic comeback, ESPN scrambled to fill programming that included NBA players' competing against one another in video games and even HORSE. As those competitions were announced, the NBA was contacted by betting operators and regulators who wanted to know whether betting odds should be offered on the unusual action, according to the sources with knowledge of the situation. The NBA strongly advised against it because the tournaments had been tape-delayed, meaning a handful of people already knew the outcomes and could benefit from that information if bets were offered. Sportsbooks agreed. The NFL recently has also found success restricting certain types of prop bets, this time through legislation. The Illinois Gaming Board in February approved the NFL's request to prohibit 10 types of what it classified as 'objectionable wagers,' including whether a kicker would miss a field goal or an extra point and whether quarterback's first pass of a game would be incomplete — the same type of 'single-actor' bets that leagues have come out against and that have reportedly sparked investigations into multiple athletes. By seeking to influence which bets are offered, leagues and their gambling partners are attempting a delicate balance of limiting bets they consider risks to the integrity of their games while still ensuring that enough betting options are offered to keep fans wagering their dollars in legal markets, rather than through offshore sportsbooks where tracking suspicious activity is much more opaque. Proponents of sports betting suggest that although the headlines about players or league staffers being investigated, or caught, for betting manipulation isn't good public relations for the sports, they're a sign that a 'complex system that detects aberrational behavior,' as Silver said in July, is working as intended. As part of their partnership agreements, leagues, betting operators and so-called integrity firms have data-sharing agreements that allow them to communicate with one another to monitor suspicious activity. "The transparency inherent with legalized sports betting has become a significant asset in protecting the integrity of athletic competition," DraftKings said in a statement. "Unlike the pre-legalization era, when threats were far more difficult to detect, the regulated industry now provides increased oversight and accountability that helps to identify potentially suspicious activity.' In the case of the pair of Cleveland Guardian pitchers, the Ohio Casino Control Commission was notified June 30 by a licensed Ohio sportsbook about suspicious wagering on Guardians games and 'was also promptly contacted by Major League Baseball regarding the events,' a commission spokesperson said in a statement. 'Under the Commission's statutory responsibilities, an independent investigation commenced.' It's why leagues and sportsbook operators consider restricting bets a fine line. 'If you have sweeping prohibitions on that type of a bet, you're taking away the ability for your league to ensure the integrity of that activity,' said Joe Maloney, a senior vice president for strategic communications at the American Gaming Association. 'You will not have the ability to work with an integrity monitor to identify any irregular betting activity on such a legal market. You will not have the collaboration of a legal operator who will share that information. You will not have the collaboration of a legal operator to say to them, 'Here's the do-not-fly list for betting activity for our league: employees, club employees, trainers, athletic officials, referees,' etc. ... 'Betting engagement on prop bets is largely a reflection of fandom. And so, by pushing that away, I think you absolutely lose the ability to properly oversee it and to root out the bad actors that would seem to exploit it. Because it will still take place.' In 2022, legal sports betting accounted for $6.8 billion in legal revenue, while illegal sports betting accounted for about $3.8 billion, according to research from the American Gaming Association, a trade association. Last year, it estimated that revenue from legal sports betting rose to $16 billion, while the illegal market grew to about $5 billion. A 2024 analysis by the International Betting Integrity Association, a nonprofit integrity firm made up of licensed gambling operators, questioned the efficacy of restricting prop bets. The IBIA reported that 59 out of 360,000 basketball games that had been offered for betting from 2017 to 2023 were 'the subject of suspicious betting.' 'There was no suspicious betting activity linked to match manipulation identified on player prop markets,' the IBIA report said. 'There is no meaningful integrity benefit from excluding such markets, which are widely available globally. Prohibiting those products will make offshore operators more attractive.' By persuading its partners to keep some prop bets off the books, the NBA nonetheless provided a precedent for how to remove bets leagues have considered, to use Manfred's term, 'unnecessary.' Would MLB, amid an ongoing investigation into two pitchers, follow? Unlike the NBA, MLB doesn't have easily defined classifications of contracts such as 10-day and two-way players. One method could instead be to target so-called first-pitch microbets. MLB is having 'ongoing conversations' related to gambling, according to a person with knowledge of the league's thinking. If baseball were to make such a push against microbets, its reasoning might mirror the NBA's last year, said Gill Alexander, a longtime sports betting commentator for VSiN. 'I think basically baseball's point would be, you know, this is the type of prop that is just begging for trouble, right?' Alexander said. Ohio, for one, would most likely agree. Last month, Gov. Mike DeWine asked the Ohio Casino Control Commission to ban prop bets on 'highly specific events within games that are completely controlled by one player," he said in a news release, while asking the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, WNBA and MLS commissioners to support his stance. 'The prop betting experiment in this country has failed badly,' DeWine said. Alexander said: 'I do think that we're in the era now where these leagues can exert some influence on these sports books, as long as it is of no financial pain to the sports books. This is one of these instances where, really, I don't agree with Rob Manfred every day, but I actually think he's probably going to get what he wants here.'
Washington Post
17 hours ago
- Washington Post
Phillies left-hander José Alvarado is reinstated following 80-game suspension for positive drug test
PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia Phillies left-hander José Alvarado returned from his rehab assignment with Triple-A Lehigh Valley and was reinstated from the restricted list before Tuesday night's game against Seattle. Alvarado's return follows an 80-game suspension for violating baseball's performance-enhancing drugs policy.
