By Joe Johnson
An Athens woman has reported to police that a baseball player has been using an explicit photograph to try and blackmail her.
She told the Athens-Clarke County Police Department that she met the suspect a few years ago while a journalist at the University of South Carolina and she interviewed him for a story about the school’s baseball team.
The suspect, who went on to play professional baseball, recently contacted the woman with an offer to pay her $100 if she would watch him masturbate via Facebook livestream.
She reportedly agreed, then immediately blocked the suspect upon receiving the money. He subsequently called her using a different phone number, and threatened to post a naked photo of her online if she didn’t watch him masturbate.
She told police that the suspect had never been her boyfriend, but did not explain how he came to have a photograph of her in the nude.
The woman said that after she again blocked him, the suspect managed to contact her another two times using different phone numbers, according to police.
The 21-year-old victim told police she wanted the harassment to stop, and that wished to prosecute the suspect for blackmail.
Now 24 and living in College Park, the suspect has no readily available current listed affiliation with Major League Baseball, after having been released in 2020 by the Detroit Tigers, the team that drafted him as an amateur two years earlier.