The Oregon State baseball team is back in the College World Series finals, thanks in large part to senior left handed pitcher Luke Heimlich. Heimlich posted a 2.80 ERA and struck out 154 batters in 125 innings of work, and showcased first round caliber talent for the Beavers in each of the last two seasons. In the 2018 MLB Draft he was left without an offer.
What happened? In 2017, he removed himself from the team after a story surfaced in The Oregonian laying out disturbing details of his guilty plea of sexually assaulting his six-year-old niece in 2011, when he was 15. After serving two years of probation, which included going through a diversion program and attending a sex offender rehabilitation program, the charges against Heimlich were dropped. To this day, he denies any wrongdoing, claiming to have made the plea deal to avoid putting his family through a trial.
The Kansas City Royals have now expressed interest in signing the left-hander, a move that has raised eyebrows at best, and sits poorly with Brenda Tracy, a rape-survivor and activist who has alleged to have been gang raped by four men, including three football players, when she attended Oregon State in 1998.
"I'm sorry, but Luke does not deserve to be on that platform and pedestal, looked up to and adored by millions of people, including young kids," she told the Star this weekend. "We should never normalize, we should never minimize. If the Royals bring him on their team, they are complicit in normalizing and minimizing."
In the age of the #MeToo movement, we have to be careful when dealing with allegations. Obviously, if an allegation is credible, we want the accused to face a trial and be punished for acting despicably. We all want the Harvey Weinsteins and Roman Polanskis of the world taken off the streets. We all want cases like Brock Turner to face stiffer punishment when the evidence is clearly stacked against them. And we all want teachers who abuse the position of authority to be out of a job if allegations against them engaging in sexual relations with students is true.
However, we also cannot just throw the concept of due process and "innocent until proven guilty" out the window. There have been cases where the accused goes to prison for a rape they never committed. The popular example of this is Brian Banks, a star football player who gave a verbal commitment to play at the University of Southern California, who accepted a plea deal of 20 years in prison when he would have gotten twice that in a criminal trial.
In 2012, after he had served five years of the sentence, his conviction was overturned after it turned out the accuser had made everything up. If that isn't enough, here are some more high profile cases: the University of Virginia fraternity at the center of the redacted Rolling Stone article, the Duke men's lacrosse team, Paul Nungesser at Columbia with Emma Sulkowicz, aka Mattress Girl, and so on.
Where does Heimlich fall on this? It's very hard to say. It is a classic case of he said, she said where a plea agreement, while it does look damning, is not an admission of guilt. Another point to keep in mind is that he was charge as a minor, and the state of Washington, where he was charged, automatically seals juvenile records for all but the most serious criminal offenses. However the fact that he has continued to vehemently deny any wrongdoing, while understandable, does not help his case in proving that he made one bad mistake and has atoned for it.
I believe in laying down the law when there is no reasonable doubt that a crime is committed. I believe in listening to the accusations, but with a healthy skepticism. Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity, maybe it was just a false remembering of key details. I believe in second chances when the accused has proven that they are contrite, and working on being better people.
So no, I don't think Heimlich should be denied a chance at making it to the major leagues. His case does not "normalize and minimize" sexual assault. In fact, if he were to be banned from playing, it would "normalize and minimize" the effects of the growing "listen and believe" trend. Is that really what this nation needs?