Twins Miguel Sano Accused Of Sexual Assault In Twitter Post

The #MeToo era has finally hit the world of professional athletes. Well, active professional athletes at least.

Miguel Sano, the Minnesota Twins young slugger, has been accused of sexual assault by a Minnesota photographer who had been with the team at an autograph signing.

The photographer’s name is Betsy Bissen and earlier today she had posted a letter to Instagram detailing her story.

Here is the text taken from SI.com.

“Let me start by saying, all I want from this, is to tell my story. You may believe me, you may not. I’ve been afraid to tell my story. Afraid that I wouldn’t get the access to shoot baseball that I got before. Since Twins Daily has been stripped of most of their access, I now realize, I have nothing to lose by telling my story.

Every day new stories come out. More women come forward about their sexual assaults and rapes. When will it end? For those of us who have been thru a similar situation, hearing each of those stories is another reminder of what we went thru. Here’s my story.

I’ve been a huge fan of baseball for the majority of my life, so naturally, I like doing sports photography and working autograph signings of Minnesota athletes. I’ve shot in the Twins camera well on many occasion, and this is where my story starts…it ends with working at an autograph signing.

He noticed me in the camera well. I didn’t pay much attention to what they were doing in the dugout, unless I was looking for a shot. I like candid shots. Shots of the guys doing funny things, pregame rituals, etc. This year was different. It started off with the first base coach hitting on me almost every game I was at. I could ignore this. The first base coach didn’t bother me until he tried to ask for my phone number. A married man, around 20 years older than me. I didn’t oblige. This is the day though that I think the athlete noticed me and remembered me.

He was lined up to do an autograph signing at the store I volunteered at. He made a comment while we got our picture together that he had seen me during the games. During the signing, he kept trying to flirt with me (I didn’t reciprocate). After the signing was over, he decided that he wanted to go to the Apple store before he left the mall. As him, his agent, and the guy I worked for walked away, he grabbed my wrist and made me go with them. (I didn’t want to cause a scene, so I just went along). We spend around a half hour inside that store before it was time for him and his agent to leave. Their car was pulled around to a back hallway door. As we got outside, the athlete decided he needed to use the restroom. I asked my boss where it was and pointed to the door we just walked thru. Apparently I was too close, and the athlete took that as a signal that I wanted him to grab me and try to take me back thru that door.

I pulled back as he held onto my wrist. It hurt, how badly he was grasping at my wrist, but he wouldn’t let go. I wasn’t going to give up my fight though. He then leaned down and tried to kiss me, more than once. Every time he did, I said no and kept pulling back. I was in a squatted position with my wrist throbbing. I screamed, no one came to help me. He finally gave up after a solid ten mins of fighting to pull me thru that door. No, he didn’t rape me, but he sure did assault me. When I said no, it should have been the end of it. He should have respected that and stopped. Instead, he hurt me and kept going.

The next day, my body was sore all over from having to fight off this athlete that thought he was entitled to take advantage of me against my will.

It’s not just the recaps of my fellow women who have been thru situations of their own that remind me of what happened, it’s every baseball game, every write up about him that rehashes this. Every time I have to hear about how great people think Miguel Sano is, I’m reminded of how awful he actually is and how he hurt me.”

Bissen also said the Twins were not aware of the incident at the time.”

First of all I will say that I would have posted the original tweet… But Bissen has a private Twitter account and I don’t follow her so SI.com was the best I could do.

Sano released his own statement today in regards to the accusation to TMZ. He had this to say:

“I unequivocally deny the allegation made against me today — it never happened. I have the utmost respect for women, especially those working in professional sports, and I deeply sympathize with anyone who has experienced sexual harassment. There is no place for it in our society.”

The amount of accusations in this day in age are staggering. Now obviously the primary motive of exposing this type of immoral behavior is to bring it to a screeching halt. It’s been happening for far to long and the #MeToo era is simply just bringing the issue to the forefront of discussion.

I’m not writing a slam piece today against Sano. The reason I refuse to do so is because we just don’t know the reality of the situation. Like I’ve said in previous blogs about these situations, I want to believe the women. I really do. And I don’t want to believe them just so we can smear the lives of all of those accused, but I want to believe that there aren’t women out there doing this simply so they can just gain compensation and attention based off of potentially false accusations.

As we stand tonight, all we have to stand on is this woman’s word. Going forward we need to keep an eye on the story and develop more educated opinions once there are more facts to base them off of.

Written By: Nick Quaglia (@NickQuag)