Chad Curtis, the former MLB player serving a seven-to-15-year prison term for sexually assaulting three high school girls in Michigan, is asking for his accusers to be revealed publicly.
Curtis was sent to prison on criminal sexual charges in 2013, and now that the three female accusers are no longer minors, he no longer feels they should remain anonymous.
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Acting as his own attorney, Curtis filed a brief in Grand Rapids federal court asking the accusers’ names to appear in court documents, saying it’s unfair to allow them to sue him anonymously.
“To allow plaintiffs to proceed with pseudonyms, to some degree, creates a verdict before the trial,” Curtis wrote, via the New York Daily News.
However, Douglas Fierberg, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, is having none of it.
“Defendant Curtis’s notoriety as an outspoken former professional baseball player has caused this matter to receive national media attention,” Fierberg said. “Plaintiffs, young women recently graduated from high school, should not be forced to have their identities revealed to the entire country so that they can receive recompense for the harm they suffered. Their identities should not be revealed so that Defendant Curtis can attempt to retry his criminal conviction and accuse them of being liars.”
Curtis knows the identity of his accusers and even said in testimony he hopes to write a book with one of his victims about their incidents, as outlined in a feature story by Greg Hanlon for Sports on Earth.
Marci Hamilton, a Cardozo Law School professor, said Curtis’ request is “a way of intimidating victims,” while New York lawyer Kevin Mulhearn called the motion “a way to silence them through public humiliation.”
One of the four plaintiffs is identified in the federal suit against Curtis, while the three high school students who accused Curtis of assaulting them during his time as a substitute teacher and weight training coach at a rural Michigan high school (during what he claimed were therapeutic massage sessions), have gone by pseudonyms.