THE MANY CRIMES OF MEL HALL

HE WAS A FLAMBOYANT PLAYER, A CHARISMATIC COACH, AND A SEXUAL PREDATOR

by Greg Hanlon

CHAPTER ONE: THE PLAYER

June 11, 1989. Spring fever for 15-year-old Jennifer Diaz* and her friends. Freshman year was winding
down. It was Andrea's* birthday, and Andrea's father had driven Jennifer, his daughter and a group of
girls down from Connecticut to a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium. A brilliant June day, right field line
seats, front row.

It's a bad view of the game, but it put them on top of the field, especially close to the Yankees' 28-year-
old right fielder, Mel Hall. Each time he jogged out to his position between innings to warm up, the girls
would ask him to toss them a ball. Hall would fake as if he would, but then he wouldn't, and then he'd
smile at them. This went on, inning after inning. Typical Hall: He was playful and mischievous, lacking the
aloofness of most ballplayers, somehow more accessible and fun loving. Often, when they played the
Red Sox, as they were on this day, he'd wear a T-shirt underneath his jersey saying, "Boston Sucks."

He toyed with the girls all game long — "You want the ball?" — but never gave them one. When Hall
moved from right field to left field to start the second game of the doubleheader, he continued to make
teasing gestures toward them. After the girls left the game early to beat the traffic, Andrea's father said
they should write Hall and ask him to autograph a baseball.

HE SAID HE HAD NOTICED THE BLOND, WHOLESOMELY BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE STANDS THAT DAY, AND
WANTED TO GET TO KNOW HER BETTER.

Two weeks went by. They were studying at the Fairfield Public Library for their freshman year final
exams when they became bored, and decided to write that letter to Hall. They addressed it to Yankee
Stadium, stuck in the mail, went back to studying, and didn't think about it again.

Until a Friday afternoon soon after, when somebody called Jennifer at home claiming to be Mel Hall. He
said he had noticed the blond, wholesomely beautiful girl in the stands that day, and wanted to get to
know her better — perhaps she and her family would like to come to Yankee Stadium for the game
tomorrow? He said he got lots and lots of fan mail but never opened it. The fact that he happened to
open her note must mean it was destiny.

It was too ridiculous. She was sure somebody was messing with her, so she hung up. Maybe it was the
boy she had a crush on, a huge Yankee fan who really liked Mel Hall. The two had just gone to the
movies and ... the phone rang again. She hung up. This happened several more times, stretching over a
couple of hours. It was a preposterous notion: Mel Hall, the major leaguer on the field that day, from
the Yankees, calling her?

Yes, impossible, said her father, who was also a big Yankees fan: It couldn't be Hall because the game
had already started, and Hall was in the lineup that night. But the phone rang again, and the person
claiming to be Hall said he was the designated hitter that night, so he could sneak into the clubhouse
and use the phone. He said he would prove to Jennifer that he was who he said he was: When he came
up to bat, he would tap home plate with his bat three times.
The Diaz family gathered around the television. Jennifer's grandfather, a huge fan too, was there, and a
family friend from down the street also came by. Hall strode up to the plate, charismatic as always,
stylish in his ‘80s Jheri curl, a natural hitter in his element. But the first pitch came in, and ... Hall did
nothing. Jennifer was embarrassed. She had always been so gullible.

Still, everyone kept watching. And before the next pitch, Hall tapped home plate with his bat three
times. Then he took his bat and pointed at the television camera.

Twenty years later, Jennifer would testify in court: "We were all ecstatic."

***

In five seasons with the Indians, Mel Hall hit .282. He finished his career with 134 homeruns and a .276
average. (Getty Images)

Mel Hall's career began full of promise. He was selected by the Chicago Cubs in the second round of the
1978 draft out of Port Byron High School in upstate New York, where he played baseball, football and
basketball, and was tabbed as a future star.

He raced through the minor leagues, debuted in the major leagues in 1981 and made the majors for
good in 1983, when he finished third in the Rookie of the Year balloting. The following year, he and
another talented young outfielder, Joe Carter, were shipped to the Indians as part of a trade for ace
pitcher Rick Sutcliffe. Although the deal helped secure the division title for the Cubs, skeptics wondered
if the team had just mortgaged its future.

Hall's production would never match his potential, however. During his 13-year major league career,
spent with the Cubs, Indians, Yankees, and, after a three-year stint in Japan, the Giants, he was mostly a
tease, a talented but ultimately mediocre player for teams that weren't very good. He never played in
the postseason, never made an All-Star team, never led the league in anything important, never hit 20
home runs or drove in close to 100 runs in the major leagues, and was generally considered a poor
defensive outfielder.

HALL BECAME KNOWN FOR HIS FLAMBOYANT GRANDIOSITY AND HIS BELIEF IN HIS OWN GREATNESS
DESPITE STATISTICAL EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY.

But just because he wasn't a star didn't mean he couldn't carry himself like one. Hall became known for
his flamboyant grandiosity and his belief in his own greatness despite statistical evidence to the
contrary. The highest-profile chapter of his career came with the Yankees, from 1989 to 1992, where he
was a limited but popular player. On a string of insipid Yankees teams slouching their way toward four
consecutive losing seasons, at least Hall had personality.

At bat, he swung hard and he swung often, producing a poor on-base percentage but pretty good home
run pop. When "Sluggo," as his Yankee teammates half-mockingly called him, connected, he punctuated
the moment with one of history's slowest home run trots, once clocked at 33 seconds. Early in his
career, he carried three sets of batting gloves in each back pocket, so, as he explained to reporters, they
would "wave goodbye as I'm trotting around the bases." He even named his glove "Lucille," the same
name B.B. King gave his guitar. Hall never said why he did this, but it fed the image of him as an
eccentric superstar — hold the superstar.
This image was augmented by the colorful quotes he often provided reporters. He once said he wanted
to fight Mike Tyson, and played up his cartoonish narcissism by telling reporters, "When God made my
body, he made something good."

He grew up poor in Montezuma, N.Y., a tiny farm community 30 miles east of Syracuse where the Halls
were one of a handful of black families. His father was a muck farmer who had played briefly in the
Cincinnati Reds chain, and his mother worked in a factory. Perhaps he was overstating his poverty when
he told reporters, "We were so poor, we ate ice for supper. We spelled poor with one ‘O' because we
ate the other one." His beginnings were so humble, he said, that after being drafted, "I signed my first
contract in dirt."

By the time Hall made it to the Yankees, those days of deprivation were long behind him. He played at a
time where even ordinary players were starting to get big-money contracts — Hall made at least $6.3
million in his big-league career, and at least another $2 million playing three years in Japan — and he
reveled in his money and status. By some accounts, he owned 15 cars, but still had a limo pick him up
from Yankee Stadium. One person close to him at the time said he would spend his large paychecks
practically as soon as he got them, and that he would literally take linen bags of cash out of the bank
"like in the movies." In 1992, he rented an apartment in Trump Tower, then New York's most
ostentatious address, where he lived down the hall from The Donald himself, the iconic emblem of that
era's brand of crass New York excess.

He owned two German shepherds, and hired a German trainer who taught them to attack at the
command of "Fass!" As if that were too ordinary a pet, he acquired two pet mountain lion cubs that he
claimed to sleep beside, and that he once brought into the Yankee Stadium clubhouse. Authorities
confiscated the animals and fined Hall several hundred dollars, but Hall was hardly chastened: "I'm
thinking about getting myself a grizzly bear," he told reporters.

"Mel flirted with danger. He was always on the edge. He liked the action, he liked to instigate," said
former Yankee teammate Steve Sax, one of only a few teammates and Yankee employees contacted
willing to say much about Hall today. Sax said Hall would sometimes call him "cracker" just to get a rise
out of him. "There were times when he was really fun to be around — he had this great big laugh — but
you just didn't know what was on the other side of the curtain."

Hall did outlandish things and found himself in outlandish predicaments. In spring training of 1989, he
put up both his wife and his girlfriend in the Indians team hotel and watched the two of them get into a
fight near the pool, in full view of everyone. Later that year, after being traded to the Yankees and while
on the disabled list with a pulled hamstring, he got into a violent clubhouse wrestling match with Rickey
Henderson. He once reportedly brought a gun into the Yankees clubhouse. All of it was taken as part of
Hall's eccentricity, what Hall himself described as "me being Mel Hall."

Hall's thirst for action, impulsiveness, and crass egotism were on full display in his nightlife, where he
indulged his two greatest passions: Spending money and chasing women. When he went to New York's
China Club and the Roseland Ballroom, he employed a $1,400-a-night bodyguard named Jimmy
McMillan. Two decades later McMillan would become semi-famous in New York when he ran for
governor and mayor on the "Rent is Too Damn High" party line. McMillan said Hall would "get women
out of the club and want to fuck ‘em in the car." He said Hall would give him up to $300 to give to the DJ
to play "songs he could get up close to the women and grind on them." McMillan would give the DJ $10,
and pocket the rest.

The photo of Mel Hall and Jennifer at her high school prom, which appeared in the 1991 Yankees team
yearbook.
"Mel Hall loved sex. Sex is what drove him," said McMillan. According to a high school teammate, Hall
impregnated two girls by the time he was a high school senior. The best guess of Texas authorities for
the number of children he eventually sired is eight.

McMillan added, "He was a young guy who made a lot of money real fast, and he wanted to buy his way
through life."

So that was Mel Hall: a disappointment as a player, a tall tale, a caricature of a narcissistic athlete
untethered from reality by sudden fame and fortune, a guy who did everything in excess. No, he
probably wasn't someone you wanted to be close with, but he filled up column space and kept things
interesting over 162 games.

So when Hall started showing up to the ballpark with 15-year-old Jennifer Diaz, the most common
reaction was one of amused curiosity.

The tabloid news show "A Current Affair" did a story on the odd couple. When Jennifer sat in the family
section with players' wives 10 and 20 years older than her, his teammates teased him for picking up his
fiancée at Toys "R" Us. The organization, in a portion of their 1991 team yearbook devoted to players
and their significant others, even included a picture of Mel and Jennifer at a school prom. No one
blinked, at least publicly. It was all part of Mel Hall being Mel Hall.

"Mel's weird," a teammate who did not want to be identified once told a reporter for The Philadelphia
Inquirer. "I mean a lot of guys in baseball are weird. But Mel's weird weird."

***

The first time Hall had sex with Jennifer, her father was asleep on the sofa several feet away. After it was
over, the 15-year-old cried. Decades later, she testified that Hall told her it was OK because he would
marry her once she turned 18.

She is now 40. Through all the years, as she steered her life from a subject of gawking into a remarkably
conventional version of suburban motherhood, she kept it all: The photos, the love letters, the apology
letters, the jewelry receipts. She needed proof. It was such a bizarre story that nobody would believe her
otherwise. Sometimes it's still hard for her to believe herself. Everything happened so fast, and she had
so little control over how it unfolded.

After the Friday night game in which Hall had amazed the Diaz family by tapping his bat three times on
the plate, he called the house and spoke to Jennifer's mother. He told her that despite his fame and
wealth, he felt overwhelmed and alone in New York, in need of a family. Jennifer's mother always had a
soft spot for strays — she "loved the unlovables," as Jennifer put it in a recent interview — and Hall had
a manipulator's ability to tell people what they wanted to hear. The two hit it off and talked for hours.
By the end of the conversation, Hall was calling her "Mother."

He invited the family to Yankee Stadium the next day for the Saturday night game. He gave them box
seats, Yankees jackets, and the signed baseball that Jennifer had asked for in her fateful letter weeks
ago. Nobody thought too much about what Hall's angle was, because thinking too much would have
ruined the rapidly evolving fantasy. But Jennifer's father, likely sensing that Hall might be interested in
his daughter, cautioned Hall upon meeting him at the stadium that his daughter was only 15.
"Keep drinking your milk, kid," Hall quipped. Everyone laughed, the potential uneasiness of the situation
diffused by humor.

The following day, a Sunday, Hall found time to speak at length again to Jennifer's mother, and the two
arranged that he would come over to the house in Fairfield, Conn., later that evening. Fairfield is a well-
to-do New York City suburb, but Jennifer says her family was at the bottom rung of the town's economic
hierarchy: Her mother ran a daycare business out of the house, and her father was a contractor. When
Hall pulled up to the Diaz home in a limo, the family was so impressed that they took pictures of his
arrival.

That particular day had been rough for Jennifer: She had gone to the beach with her friends and told
them about what had transpired with Hall, but, not without a little envy, her friends had made fun of
her. When Hall arrived, he said he had come because he heard she was upset. He said he would protect
her, and that destiny had brought them into each other's lives. And, only a day after meeting her in
person, he told her that he loved her.

For the rest of the week he came over every night after the game, fantasizing to Jennifer way past
midnight about their future together. Before she knew it, before anyone had asked her how she felt
about it, he had moved into her family's home. Yes, Mel Hall, a major league baseball player, was
coming home after every game and sleeping on the living room floor of a suburban family whose 15-
year-old daughter he had just met and with whom he now claimed to be in love.

That same week, he bought Jennifer a red Chevy Cavalier convertible — despite the fact that she was
too young to have a driver's license. Gifts came pouring in to her family as well. Tickets to every Yankees
game for the whole clan — Jennifer's attendance was mandatory — and transportation via limo. A
Corvette convertible for her father. One morning, bulldozers showed up at their home to start digging
an in-ground pool. If Hall wanted to buy his way through life, as his bodyguard McMillan suggested, he
was certainly buying his way into the Diaz's hearts.

Jennifer poses with the Chevy Cavalier that Mel Hall gave her.
At some point within those dizzying first two weeks, Hall gave Jennifer a diamond ring. She said she
wasn't sure, that she was a little scared, so Hall said they could call it a "promise ring" until she was
ready to commit. But for all intents and purposes, in the minds of the people who had any say in this —
that is, Hall and Jennifer's family — the two were engaged to be married from that moment onward.

"It was a whirlwind," she said. "Everything went really fast. But I think that was his intention, to keep
everything moving. I think he seized that opportunity. He was always talking about that whole ‘destiny'
thing, because I had so many questions and wasn't ‘all-in' at that point."

Prior to Hall's sudden, inexplicable arrival in their lives, Jennifer's mom had operated her daycare
business in the living room. But because Hall was sleeping there, and because he had promised to take
care of the family's financial needs to a degree the Diaz's couldn't have dreamt about before, she
discontinued the business. Jennifer's father continued to work, but the upshot was that the family had
become financially dependent on Hall.

"They sold out," Jennifer would testify later about her parents. "They turned their brain off for three
years. They were star-struck. They trusted him. And he was calling my mom ‘Mother,' and she thought
she was helping this New York Yankee who needed a family and needed a home and needed care and
love, because he didn't get it from his family, and she felt responsibility to take care of this Yankee and
trusted him."

Jennifer's family became just as visible at Yankee games as she was, which provided public cover for
Hall: If her parents were OK with what was going on, who were his teammates to judge?

HALL EVENTUALLY MOVED FROM THE LIVING ROOM INTO THE MASTER BEDROOM, DISPLACING THE
PARENTS TO HER OLD ROOM.

"Whenever I saw her with him, they were usually there," said Jim Leyritz, a teammate of Hall's during
the era. "I never saw it as a child predator type thing. He was almost a father figure to her. He never
talked nasty or dirty about her. There was a respect factor there." As the photo of Hall with his teenage
girlfriend in the Yankee yearbook suggests, even the front office seemed to tacitly condone the
relationship. (Jeff Idelson, the Yankees director of media relations and publicity at the time and now
president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, declined comment through a spokesman for this article.
Tom Bannon, publisher of the 1991 yearbook, did not respond to an interview request.)

Hall eventually moved from the living room into the master bedroom, which he shared with Jennifer,
displacing the parents to her old room. When he began to touch her sexually, which he did before he
had intercourse with her, she pretended she was asleep. As things progressed to intercourse, she didn't
tell anybody, but nobody asked too many questions.

They were "together," in a semi-consensual relationship, for three years. All the while, Hall had
maintained to Jennifer's parents that he would keep her "pure" until she turned 18, at which point he
would marry her. (The age of consent in Connecticut was and still is 16, a year older than Jennifer was
before Hall started sleeping with her.) In deference to Hall's promise, Jennifer's mother let Hall meet his
needs with other women on the road, happily signing onto that condition if it meant that Hall would
marry her daughter and take care of the family for the rest of their lives.
Somehow, despite the fact that Hall shared a bedroom with their daughter, Jennifer's parents believed
that Hall was refraining from sexual contact with her until she was 18. They continued to believe this in
the subsequent decades — even after Hall was convicted for sexually assaulting an underage girl. When
Hall's lawyer cross-examined Jennifer during the punishment phase of his trial, after he had already
been found guilty, the lawyer tried to discredit Jennifer by noting that even her own parents didn't think
they were having sex.

"That's why I have issues with my family, ma'am," Jennifer replied. "That's why I'm here alone."

Mel Hall with Jennifer on the floor of her parents' living room.

***

The agreement Hall brokered with Jennifer's mother enabled him to sleep around, but Jennifer
remained under the impression that he was faithful. She would have every reason to think that, given
Hall's maniacal possessiveness. He would pick her up from high school and insist that she make a beeline
to the car, without looking up. He allowed a small circle of friends he perceived as non-threatening, but
made her end friendships with others. Particularly threatening to Hall was the boy Jennifer had had a
crush on before Hall invaded her life, a 15-year-old high school sophomore who quickly became the
subject of consuming jealousy for the 28-year-old major leaguer. Jennifer used to love going to the
beach, but Hall stopped that. She thinks the pool on the family property was Hall's attempt to keep her
out of the sight of other men.

"It was Mel Hall all the time," she testified. "Any time he left [for a road trip], he would reprimand me
and tell me not to see anybody, not to talk to anybody, not to go anywhere, not to do anything but to
basically wait for his calls."

She added in an interview, "He was so excited that I was pure, that I was a virgin [prior to meeting Hall].
And I think in this sick, demented way, he was protecting that."

To mark his possession, he made her wear a diamond-encrusted necklace of his jersey number, 27, and
a gold bracelet that said, "Mel." He wanted to propose formally to her at a school dance, to underscore
that Jennifer belonged to him and not any of those boys, but Jennifer was too embarrassed about the
idea to go through with it.

His possessiveness escalated as the relationship went on. One time, on a rare trip out to dinner, he
caused a scene by getting in the face of a man he thought was looking at Jennifer. More than once, he
locked her in a closet for a few hours because he didn't approve of her clothing. His note of apology for
one of these episodes was entered into the prosecution's evidence during the sentencing phase of the
trial. It read:

"Baby, when I asked you to change, it's because I love you. I know sometimes [I] am a little tough but no
one loves you better or more. Mel."

Hall never struck her, but he made life miserable enough that it was easier for Jennifer to tiptoe around
Hall's tantrums than to defy him. Also, her family's finances depended on Hall, which meant that
keeping the peace with him became her responsibility.
"YOU WOULD BE NOTHING WITHOUT ME. YOU CAN'T LEAVE ME. WHAT'S YOUR FAMILY GOING TO
DO?"

"He would tell me, ‘You would be nothing without me. You can't leave me. What's your family going to
do?'" she testified.

Despite this, or maybe because of this, Jennifer found herself evolving from semi-willing chattel to a full
participant in the relationship. "I wasn't ‘all-in,' but I became ‘all-in,'" she said. "I think part of it was,
‘This guy is so crazy about me.' And he would say, basically, ‘I could be with any woman, and you should
be honored, you should start loving me back.' And then I thought that I did."

When Hall decided he wanted to train for the upcoming season in Florida during the winter of 1991-92,
the Diaz's followed and moved from Connecticut, and Jennifer switched schools. When the Yankees
season started in April, Hall decided he wanted Jennifer to live with him in his new place in Trump
Tower. She was two months shy of graduating from high school in Florida, but Hall told her she didn't
need to graduate as long as he was providing for her. To this day, Jennifer doesn't have a high school
diploma.

She spent most of 1992 cooped up in Trump Tower, where Hall's limo driver kept an eye on her to make
sure she didn't leave for long stretches to hang out with friends. Her one indulgence was going to the
Carnegie Deli every afternoon for an egg sandwich.

Hall and Jennifer once went out to dinner with their neighbors down the hall, Donald Trump and Marla
Maples, Trump's girlfriend and later his second wife. But at a certain point, as Jennifer remembers, the
relationship between Hall and Trump soured, which Jennifer believes resulted from Hall's being behind
on rent.

She remembers Trump approaching her with a challenging smile one day and asking, "What are you
doing with this guy?"

Ultimately, Jennifer began asking herself the same question. It wasn't that it dawned on her that she
was being sexually abused — that realization didn't fully click until decades later. Rather, what began to
eat at her was the asymmetry between the restrictiveness Hall imposed on her and the freedoms he
claimed for himself: Why did Hall and his close friend, Deion Sanders, get to go to strip clubs when the
couple visited Sanders in Atlanta, yet she couldn't leave the house? How fair was it that she had to be
close to the phone when he was on the road, but when she called his hotel room one time, a woman
answered? What were those four-hour trips "to the gym" about, anyway? What did it mean when the
owner of the limo company Hall used once pulled her aside and said, "You need to open your eyes?"

She had long suspected he was cheating, but never had any proof. Then one night, in the fall of 1992,
she drove to a Florida hotel where she suspected he was having a dalliance. She saw him in the parking
lot in the midst of an angry encounter with another woman. It was obvious that the two were
romantically linked.

She raged at him like she'd never raged before, and raged at herself for whatever part she had played in
allowing this all to happen by buying in for all those years. It was the anger of someone unleashing the
emotions she had bottled up for the previous three years. She realized then that none of the things she
had been led to believe and to accept, by Hall as well as her parents, were to be believed or accepted.

"I just kept saying, ‘Why?' I wasn't even mad at the situation. I was mad because I had felt so caged. But
yet he's living this life, and he's always putting this guilt on me. So it was just, ‘Why?'"

After catching him in the act, Jennifer resolved that she was done with Hall. Her parents, having seen
how devastated she was that night, didn't pressure her otherwise. She talked with Hall on the phone
once, but didn't see him again until she faced him down on the witness stand 17 years later.

***

She soon began her long climb back from being Hall's child fiancée and her parents' meal ticket into an
adult capable of standing on her own two feet. Her first job was at Hooters, a halfway house of sorts for
someone who suddenly needed to fend for herself, but who had been inculcated with the idea that all
she was good for was smiling and looking pretty.

She began going to church. The pastor, as it happened, had been the Yankees team chaplain several
years before. He told Jennifer he had prayed that she would get out of her relationship with Hall. It all
couldn't have been a coincidence, she believes.

She kept going to church, attended a bible college, and through church met her eventual husband, to
whom she is still married with three children. She now runs her own interior design business and lives in
the suburbs of a major American city.

Yet for most of this time, she has lived with the notion that her relationship with Hall had been a
dysfunctional one, as distinguished from a sexually abusive one. Although she had the feeling deep
down that something was completely wrong, it was never validated by the people closest to her.

"It was brushed off. ‘You're dramatic, you're overreacting,'" she said. "To so many people around me it
was normal. I never thought of what it really was until I talked to people outside the situation, and their
mouths would pop open."

No, she didn't begin to have a full understanding of what she had experienced until 2007, when she
learned that Hall had been charged with sexual abuse of a 12-year-old girl. Two years later, over the
objections of her parents, she met with prosecutors before Hall's trial and told them everything that
happened to her. She mailed them her stash of mementos, her proof.

"That's when I realized: This was abuse. And that was just the most sobering time. They [the
prosecutors] looked me in the eye and said, ‘This is what this is.'"

***

To the Yankees organization, Hall had always walked a fine line between being a semi-tolerable
eccentric and a pain in the ass.

In 1990, after Yankees manager Stump Merrill benched him against left-handed pitchers — a reasonable
move considering Hall's .222 lifetime batting average against them — Hall threw a tantrum in the
clubhouse, slamming Merrill's door so hard the hinges and doorknob jarred loose. He publicly
demanded a trade, but nobody wanted him: "I looked around and couldn't find any takers," General
Manager Gene Michael told reporters.

Mel Hall bats for the Giants in 1996, his final season. (Getty Images)

As the team began turning over its roster and slowly assembling the pieces of a championship
contender, Hall's act grew ever more tired. He seemed to sense that his status was threatened by the
next generation of up and comers, and he took his frustrations out on one of those talented young
players, Bernie Williams, whose reticent demeanor was 180 degrees the opposite from Hall's.

With Williams, Hall took rookie hazing to abusive extremes. (Some say Hall's ire was initially triggered by
a Williams' base running mistake that cost Hall a cycle.) He called Williams "Bambi," mocking his large
doe eyes, which were magnified by his bulky glasses. Alternately, he called him "Mr. Zero," Hall's
assessment of Williams' value. He once taped a sign on Williams' locker saying "Mr. Zero," and would
say, "Shut up, Zero," whenever Williams tried to speak, something that reportedly once nearly brought
Williams to tears. Things got so vicious that management interceded on Williams' behalf.

"Mel was basically bullying Bernie and we put an end to it," responded Buck Showalter, the current
Baltimore Orioles manager who was then a Yankee coach, via an email from an Orioles spokesperson.

And while Hall reveled in the status that being a Yankee conferred, he was hardly deferential toward the
organization's tradition. During Old Timer's Day in 1992, he walked out onto the field and asked
Showalter, by then the Yankee manager, "Who are these old fucking guys?"

"That's when I knew he had to go," said Showalter.

Hall's contract expired at the end of the 1992 season. The Yankees showed no interest in him and
neither did any other major league team, so Hall spent the next three years playing reasonably well in
Japan, hitting 64 home runs. He returned at the age of 35 with the San Francisco Giants, his best days
behind him, as a pinch hitter.

"Pinch hitting is a vital role, but I will never accept it," Hall told the San Francisco Chronicle in late April.
Less than a month later, he was released. Signed by the White Sox a few weeks later, he played four
games in the minors and was released again. He never returned to the major leagues.
CHAPTER TWO: THE COACH

When Courtney Miller* was little, her mother enrolled her in dance classes, hoping to raise a proper,
delicate Texas girl. But Courtney was tall, gawky, and painfully shy. She was a horrible dancer, and every
class ended in tears.

After that, Courtney's father, Gary Miller*, tried to interest her in sports. He had grown up a huge sports
fan himself, so he was thrilled to find that Courtney was as natural an athlete as she was unnatural a
dancer. Basketball was her favorite, and on the court, banging on the boards with the boys, her tomboy
qualities served her well. By 1998, at the age of 12, she had become one of the very best players her age
in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, a hotbed of competitive youth sports.

HE HAD THE LARGER-THAN-LIFE AURA OF A PRO ATHLETE, BUT HE FLATTERED PEOPLE BY LETTING
THEM IN.

Gary Miller recognized Hall at one of Courtney's AAU games that year and asked him for some baseball
tips for his son. Hall, two years into retirement, was fast becoming a popular figure in the youth sports
scene of the area, where he had moved with his wife before they split up, making the transition from
athlete to coach. It was easy: For one, he was an athlete who had made it, which provided the ultimate
caché among parents who wanted their kids to go as far in sports as their talent could take them. But
people also responded to his personality: The defiant brashness of his playing days had mellowed into a
winning jauntiness. He had the larger-than-life aura of a pro athlete, but he flattered people by letting
them in.

True, nobody knew exactly how he lived and supported himself: Despite his apparent wealth, he always
seemed to be crashing on people's couches or asking to borrow money, and he had the elusive
shadiness of someone who had bought his way through life until he had nothing left. But he was
charming, and he had a huge, infectious laugh, and he had played in the big leagues.

"I grew up an old Milwaukee Brave fan, and I just really looked up to those baseball players. And here I
met a Major League Baseball player," Gary Miller would later testify.

The Millers quickly formed a close friendship with Hall. He began giving private baseball instruction to
Courtney's 10-year-old brother and providing Courtney with basketball lessons. Hall had some
experience: He had been a basketball star in high school and during his career had served as a volunteer
high school basketball coach while living in Montreal with his first wife. Both of Courtney's parents
worked full-time, often at odd hours, so Hall began helping out with chores like mowing the lawn and
picking up Courtney and her brother from school.

It all seemed like a great opportunity for the 12-year-old Courtney, who had become determined to earn
a college basketball scholarship that would provide the middle-class girl with a free education. Perhaps
more importantly, the pursuit of that scholarship had become the linchpin of her identity: Even as she
blossomed on the court, she was still awkward and introverted off it — "like a turtle in a shell," as she
described herself in a recent interview. (She is now 28.) The pressures of puberty were making it
unacceptable to be a tomboy. Other girls were beginning to display the traditional feminine behaviors
Courtney had always found awkward. That's what had brought her to tears in dance class all those years
ago.
So when Hall told her she was good enough for a scholarship if she kept working with him, it validated
her. When he acted like a kid with her and laughed with her, it validated her. When he bought her and
her brother the newest athletic gear, and even gave Courtney his pink and white Chiba Lotte Marines
jersey from Japan, it validated her.

"He'd pick me up from [middle] school in a Jag — it was something I bragged to my friends about,"
Courtney said. "I'm transitioning from being a major tomboy, where I looked like a boy, into a more girly
aspect. And he was just right there. Your buddy. He'll do anything for you."

Her parents were also vulnerable. Their marriage was in trouble, and within a few years, they would
divorce. Hall capitalized on the family's tumult, and positioned himself as an indispensable component
for achieving something they all wanted: A scholarship for Courtney.

When Hall asked for something in return, Gary Miller was inclined to accommodate. Hall told the family
he was having a house built in Southlake, a wealthy suburb, and in the meantime, for just a couple
weeks, he needed a place to stay.

If this was 2014 and not 1998, it is likely that many parents would do a quick Google search, become
alarmed at the discovery of Hall's relationship with Jennifer, and sever their ties. But Google wasn't yet
ubiquitous, and private indiscretions tended to stay private. Besides, the Millers were trusting people by
nature.

They allowed Hall to stay in their house, and didn't object when a couple weeks turned into more than
three months, which Hall attributed to construction delays on his new house. They didn't object either
when Gary saw Hall and his daughter lying together on her bed — after all, they were fully clothed, and
were in a seemingly platonic position of sitting up against the headrest. And they didn't object when Hall
moved into Courtney's bedroom, displacing Courtney to the family room, which Courtney rationalized
by reasoning that it was a privilege to watch television on the couch late at night.

It is generally accepted that child molesters make their victims feel older than they actually are while
they themselves act younger. Soon after moving in, Hall introduced to the Miller children what they
would later describe as "a game": Hall would take his pants and underwear off, lie flat on his back, and
kick his legs in the air, causing his private parts to flop around. He would laugh, and because he was
laughing, Courtney's brother would laugh, and because her brother was laughing, Courtney would laugh
too. Hall even had Courtney's brother do it. He tried, but it wasn't as funny as when Hall did it.

Pretty soon, Hall's inappropriate behavior escalated and he began masturbating in front of Courtney: "I
remember one time he just said, ‘It's like a fountain,' or something," Courtney remembered.

The next step was making Courtney touch him, which Courtney also remembered as being "like a game,"
her perceptions of normality and boundaries having been systematically broken down. Then they began
watching porn together, with Hall telling her, "You've got to learn somehow."

Soon enough, Courtney was firmly under his thumb, his to do almost whatever he wanted. When he
drove her to practice, he would crudely reach across to the passenger seat to grope her, reveling in the
fact that he was able to do so. He would make her perform oral sex, signaling her by saying her name in
a playful, singsong voice, while looking at her with lascivious eyes that underscored that he meant
business. In his playing days, he had used his status to make girls into his personal playthings, which
validated his grandiose self-image. In retirement, he was using whatever status he had left to do the
same thing.

HE APPARENTLY GOT A KICK OUT OF MOLESTING COURTNEY JUST UNDER THE RADAR OF DETECTION:
"THAT WAS HIS FETISH."

He apparently got a kick out of molesting Courtney just under the radar of detection: "That was his
fetish. I think he got off on that adrenaline rush," Courtney said. On one occasion, after traveling with
the Miller family to an AAU tournament in Nashville, he made Courtney stop in his hotel room and
perform oral sex on him just before she went downstairs to a formal opening reception. When he
eventually moved out of the Miller house and into an apartment with his girlfriend and their infant son,
he would invite Courtney over to babysit, and make her perform oral sex while his girlfriend slept
several feet away. (The house he was supposedly building in Southlake, like so many things he told so
many other people, was a complete lie. In reality, he lived off other people for years.)

During this time, Courtney was barely aware that she was being victimized. Her father trusted and
revered Hall, so the notion that he was a predator caused cognitive dissonance. There was also the fact
that she was sheltered and knew even less about sex than most girls her age. "With me being 12 at the
time, I really had no idea what was going on," she said. "I just thought this is how normal people act at
this age, I guess."

Perhaps most confusing was Hall's constant flattery of her: Hall was the first male, excluding her father,
who ever told her she was pretty. That he was also the first male to kiss her somehow felt right.

"It meant something, it was a little special," she testified. "I didn't have a whole lot of friends, and so,
you know, it just felt like I had a — we never said boyfriend/girlfriend, but that's what it felt like."

***

Hall's molestation of Courtney went on for months, and he managed to break every boundary except for
one: Courtney refused to have intercourse. Hall responded to this by becoming more insistent. Courtney
reacted by finally starting to pull away, and by slowly coming to the realization that what was happening
wasn't right.

At this, Hall became angry and possessive. He would pull her face against his and make her tell him that
she loved him. When she refused, he would squeeze her face forcefully until she complied. At trial, she
testified that she never says those words to her parents because "it doesn't mean anything to me
anymore."

But Hall had gained some leverage over Courtney by this point: With the blessing of her parents, he had
recruited her from her previous AAU team onto a team he would personally coach. This meant that he
now controlled her playing time.

The team, the Texas Fire, one of hundreds of teams affiliated with the Texas Shooting Stars, the largest
basketball club in the country, would soon be considered the best AAU team in the state. Nine players,
including Courtney, would later earn Division I college scholarships, and one went onto play in the
WNBA. Unlike most other AAU teams, which often broke down on racial lines, the Fire's all-star, multi-
racial roster reflected Hall's ability to court kids and their families. Their run-and-gun style of play, which
eschewed set plays, echoed Hall's disdain for the idea that talent should be bound by structure or rules.
Today, players on the team realize that Hall was disinterested in teaching the finer points of the game,
and that coaching for him was more about recruiting girls than actually helping them grow as players.

Courtney was the leading scorer and arguably best player on a first-year Fire team that went 74-12, but
the team was so loaded it could win without her. So when Courtney started resisting Hall's requests to
have sex and started keeping her distance from him off the court, he punished her by benching her. At
the AAU national tournament in Orlando, where college scouts came in droves to spot the next
generation of recruits, Hall sat her for long stretches. (Still, the team placed ninth nationally in the 13-
and-under division.) This was especially distressing to Courtney because Hall had convinced her that he
was the key to her scholarship hopes. He told her that other players on the team were sleeping with
him, so what was her problem?

"I was stuck in a situation where I was on his team, and I felt a little trapped. Like what am I supposed to
do?" she said.

Eventually, Courtney out-waited Hall. He stopped demanding favors from her. The team broke up
shortly thereafter as the players left for other teams. Hall and Courtney went their separate ways.

"I think he just thought, ‘I've gotta move on here. I've gone as long as I can with this one and should
move on before she catches on,'" she said.

In subsequent years, away from Hall, Courtney's game kept improving. The confusion and trauma of
being abused actually sharpened her focus on basketball. The court was her safe space, where she could
be assertive and not a "turtle in a shell." During her senior year, she was recognized by a major media
outlet as the area's player of the year, and she went on to earn the Division I scholarship she always
wanted.

Off the court was another story. She told three people what had happened to her, but made them swear
not to tell anyone else, and spent the next decade of her life carrying around a secret. During high
school and college, she didn't have a single boyfriend.

"After that happened, I really, really clammed up," she said. "I was always super shy and scared of
people. Then all of a sudden it hit me like a ton of bricks."

***

Courtney might have been the team's best scorer, but the captain of the Texas Fire was Katie Bentley*, a
blond 13-year-old. Katie was spunky and charismatic, with an extroverted maturity that allowed her to
be as close with Coach Hall as she was with her teammates.

She went on to be the captain of both her high school and Division I college teams. Now 29, she works
as a high school basketball coach. Then as now, she had reverence for the profession, believing that the
coach is someone whose approval should be sought and earned.

"I liked getting better. I liked that I was impressing [Hall]," she later testified. "I really felt the need to
show off for him, just to show what I was capable of doing. Really, like when he would give me lessons
and if I would do it well, like you could see that reaction. You could see that smile: ‘Good job. Well
done.' That was comforting."
The close bond Katie and Hall shared on the court soon progressed off of it. They began talking on the
phone for hours, deep into the night. Hall was easy to talk to: He was an empathic listener with a good
sense of humor and the kind of perfectly assured demeanor that appeals to adolescents. She didn't feel
smothered by Hall's attention. She liked it.

"It didn't seem unusual," she testified. "I wanted to talk. We talked a lot."

IT NEVER ONCE CROSSED HER MIND TO BE AFRAID OF HALL UNTIL IT WAS TOO LATE.

The conversations covered everything, even personal things, so it didn't seem all that jarring to her
when Hall told her one night that she was really pretty, and that she might be embarrassed about what
he was going to say next, but he wanted her to be his girlfriend. Likewise, at a team fundraiser car wash,
when the team got into a water fight and Hall reached underneath her shirt, she chalked it up to the fact
that Hall sometimes just acted like a kid.

In short, it never once crossed her mind to be afraid of Hall until it was too late. In July of 1999, Katie, by
then 14, went to Hall's apartment to babysit. Courtney was also there, as was Hall's girlfriend and the
couple's infant child. Katie was unconcerned — surely there was nothing to be afraid of with someone
who was the father of such a cute kid. But when Courtney, the girlfriend, and the baby left for reasons
Katie doesn't now recall, Katie found herself alone with Hall.

Hall took Katie's overalls off, and started kissing her body, telling her how pretty she was. Katie,
assertive even in the most terrifying and confusing moment of her life, managed to tell Hall, "Please
don't put it inside me."

But Hall had never encountered a limit he didn't want to test. While it was happening, it didn't
completely occur to Katie that she was being raped because she was in shock, with a disconnect
between her body and brain. All she knew is that she felt a pressure in that area she had never felt
before, and that it hurt. When she got home that night, her underwear was bloodstained. She threw
them away, "because I didn't want anybody to ask about them."

The next day in school, she blurted out to her best friend, "Mel Hall raped me," but she made the friend
promise not to say anything. She didn't tell her parents or anyone else.

"I think part of me was scared, or part of me didn't think they would believe me," she said in a recent
interview. "Either that, or I thought my dad would've killed him."

For child sex abuse victims, the choice of whether to speak up or stay silent is a cost-benefit calculation
with horrible outcomes on both sides. Speak up and risk being called a liar, or be stigmatized as
damaged goods, or alienate a person you might still care about, or watch someone retaliate on your
behalf. Stay silent and allow the rapist to rape again.

Within a few weeks of the first incident, Katie, her father, and Hall were talking about softball. Katie's
father, like Courtney's father, trusted Hall entirely. He handed Hall his credit card and told him to take
Katie to buy a glove.

Katie faced a stark choice: "It was either tell my dad [in Hall's presence] that I didn't want to go, and he'd
figure out everything, or go."

She couldn't bring herself to tell her father.

The terror she felt when she got into Hall's Jeep is "a feeling that I can't escape, and put away. Like, you
think, ‘He's in prison now, he's never gonna do this again, yada yada.' But it still doesn't change."

They pulled off the main road and onto a gravel path that led to a boat ramp by a lake. Katie described
feeling "paralyzed" during the encounter in the back of the vehicle, a phenomenon known as "tonic
immobility," when rape victims shut down in a state of shock so as to minimize the trauma.

She doesn't remember anything after that, or how she got home. After this second incident, which
occurred after the Texas Fire had broken up, she made sure never to be alone with Hall again.

***

In 2007, eight years after Hall raped her, Katie watched a movie called "Georgia Rule." The film concerns
a troubled character played by Lindsay Lohan whose behavior traces from having been raped by her
stepfather. It was critically panned — Ebert and Roeper gave it two thumbs down — but it struck a
chord with Katie, who longed to face up to the traumas of her past like Lohan's character eventually did.

She was in her early 20s by this point, an adult and not a child. Aside from her friend, who she told after
the first incident, she had also told her mother and her brother about Hall, but she made them promise
not to tell anyone. Her brother was a Catholic priest, so she prefaced the conversation by telling him
that she needed to confide in him as a priest as opposed to a brother.

"IT WAS AN ‘AH-HA' MOMENT, THAT IF I WANT TO BE OK, I HAVE TO TELL SOMEONE."

But after seeing that movie, she said, "I had the worst feeling" — that something likely happened to
other girls. She had been inching toward coming forward all those years, but the movie pushed her over
the edge.

"It was an ‘Ah-ha' moment, that if I want to be OK, I have to tell someone," she said.

That night, she began calling, texting and Facebook messaging her old Texas Fire teammates. She had
been the team leader all those years ago and, in a way, she still was. Many of them had remained
friendly acquaintances through high school and college as they progressed up the ranks of big-time
basketball, playing with and against each other. She didn't know about some of the girls, but she was
pretty certain something had happened to Courtney.

"She obsessed and defended Mel the way I would," she said. "There was the same loyalty that we
shared. And just the way she would look at him, you could just tell there was something going on. And I
knew if I was able to be persuaded and manipulated like that, and my confidence was a lot higher than
hers, you just knew something happened."

Katie wrote a Facebook message to Courtney telling her to call her right away, that it was important.

Says Courtney, "I immediately knew exactly what she was talking about."
CHAPTER THREE: THE CRIMINAL

In May of 2007, Courtney Miller and Katie Bentley reported to Texas law enforcement officials that Mel
Hall, their former AAU basketball coach, had sexually assaulted them nearly a decade before. Because
the assaults took place in both Tarrant and Denton Counties, the women — who were 12 and 14 when
the assaults occurred — had to file separate reports for each jurisdiction.

The authorities started an investigation, talking to other young women in the area who had contact with
Hall in high-level youth sports over the previous decade. They soon concluded that Courtney and Katie
likely represented a fraction of the girls Hall had abused.

They learned that in 1998, the same year Hall had lived for a time with the Millers, he had also moved
into the family home of 10-year-old Dana Becker*. It was supposed to be for a weekend, but he stayed
three to four months. During this time, he would kiss Dana's forehead and cheeks, while telling her what
he had told Jennifer Diaz all those years ago: "Some day I'm going to marry you."

One day, Dana's 12-year-old brother walked in to see a shirtless Hall underneath a blanket with an
underage girl on top of him, a girl who was not Dana. The father kicked Hall out of the house soon after.

The police spoke to Katie and Courtney's teammates on the Texas Fire, and many corroborated the
notion that Hall was a serial predator. According to a police report, one young woman "felt
uncomfortable with him in reference to some of his comments." Another said the same thing, adding
that she "heard that he may have touched other girls inappropriately. [The player] advised Hall was a
freeloader and a thief, because he lived at different homes with other people." Yet another said "she did
hear that Hall had been touching some girls, but did not know who."

People close to the situation said that Hall often seduced the mothers of the girls he was targeting. And
according to Katie, two members of the team who declined to come forward confided in her that Hall
had molested them.

Another Texas Fire teammate, Kayla Bonnet*, who was 13 at the time, testified that Hall would play
one-on-one with her and brush his hands against her breasts and rear end. Kayla eventually left the
team amidst her mother's concerns that Hall was behaving inappropriately: She didn't like that he would
let Kayla drive his Jaguar, or that he would buy her gifts, or talk to her on the phone and tell her he loved
her, a statement that, he tried to assure Kayla's mother, he meant only in a fatherly way.

Kayla and Hall didn't see each other for around two years, but when Kayla was 15, they met again at
basketball tournament and started talking.

"It kind of turned into, ‘You know, I saw you the other day. I thought you were really pretty. I just kind of
want to know if I could get to know you better, maybe take you out on a date,'" Kayla testified.

Hall began calling her, constantly, saying he loved her and wanted to date her. It progressed to a point
where Kayla realized she was in too deep, and that she couldn't stop the calls on her own.

She went to her mother, who had always suspected that Hall was up to no good. The mother, Vera
Bonnet*, had once asked Hall why he coached girls instead of boys. His answer — "Boys are harder to
coach because they don't listen," according to Vera — was telling for someone who himself had been a
hard-headed male athlete, and who capitalized on the pliant, impressionable nature of young girls.
Despite her suspicions two years prior, when her daughter had played for Hall, Vera Bonnet had opted
against blowing the whistle to other parents. "I had no concrete evidence. And when you start saying
that stuff, you really need concrete evidence," she said.

After learning of Hall's persistent phone calls to her 15-year-old daughter, Vera now felt she had the
definitive proof she needed. She contacted Kayla's high school and had Hall banned from coming to
games (though Hall would flout the ban). She also wrote a letter to the AAU about Hall's behavior and
demanded his ouster from the organization.

Vera's actions apparently had an impact. By all accounts, Hall never coached youth basketball again.
Whether he was formally admonished or banned is an open question: Prosecutors tried to subpoena
AAU records, but couldn't pull up anything from that time period, and AAU President Henry Forrest said
he had no records on file for Hall. Forrest also said the AAU did not perform formal background checks
on the organization's 80,000 volunteer coaches until three years ago. The action only came when former
AAU president and CEO Robert Dodd was himself accused of molestation. The likely result of Vera's
actions was that Hall simply felt the heat and moved on.

In 2002 and 2003, Hall tried to get back into baseball, and spent those next two seasons playing and
coaching for independent league teams like the Fort Worth Cats, the Springfield (Mo.)/Ozark Mountain
Ducks and the Coastal Bend/Texas Aviators. The ex-major leaguer hit one home run.

By 2004, he was back in the Metroplex, this time coaching select girl's softball for an organization called
The Wicked Sports Association. He also rented a building in nearby Denton to offer private hitting
lessons. This not only allowed him to earn some income off his status as an ex-major leaguer, but,
significantly, it also kept him in the company of teenage girls.

The sport was different, but Hall's behavior was the same as when he coached basketball. One player,
14-year-old Karen Bass*, later told investigators that Hall was "very nice and very sweet. And then it
started to escalate into more than just a player/coach relationship."

During a team pool party, he grabbed her around the waist from behind and "whisper[ed] lewd things in
my ear, like making weird noises and stuff." Once, while pitching "soft toss" batting practice to her with
her father standing just a few feet away, he told her under his breath that she had a nice body, that he
wanted to have sex with her.

***

Lori (last name withheld at her request), a divorced mother of two who has a successful career in
consulting sales, first met Mel Hall in late 2006 at a Metroplex sports bar, when she was in her mid-40s.
She was immediately charmed by his confident energy, forceful physical presence, and the biographical
details he provided, both true (that he had played for the Yankees) and false (that he was having a big
house built in suburban Frisco).

"WE LAUGHED THE WHOLE TIME. HE WAS JUST FUN."

They began dating. When they went to play golf, "We laughed the whole time. He was just fun," she
said. When Lori asked him how he got such coveted tee-times at an exclusive country club, he replied,
"Because I'm Mel Motherfucking Hall," and Lori laughed, not realizing at the time that Hall wasn't being
ironic.
In bed, he was forceful, dominant, and intense. "Is this pussy mine?" he would ask her over and over.
"How much do you love this dick?"

She sensed in some recess of her mind that something was amiss with Hall: Too many larger-than-life
stories, too many balls in the air. Why was this guy, who was supposedly building a huge house, always
trying to borrow $20? If he had so much money, why was he crashing on the floor of a friend's house for
so long? And why was he driving a borrowed car?

But Hall had a way of floating above such prosaic concerns, of deflecting any skepticism with the ease
and cool cunning of a pathological liar, so Lori didn't read too deeply into things. Besides, her
expectations were to have fun, not to marry him. "A guy like that, you're not looking for anything long
term," she said. "You're just looking to get on his merry-go-round and ride for a while."

As a Christmas present to her nephews that year, she ordered Hall's baseball cards online, and had Hall
sign them. While online, she came across the prom picture of him and Jennifer from the 1991 Yankees
yearbook. Hall told her it was a photo op set up by his agent, and that the young girl was Jennifer
Capriati, a teen tennis sensation during that era who had made the cover of Sports Illustrated with the
caption, "And She's Only 13!"

Lori believed him, she guessed. In addition, when Hall told her he was having problems with his phone,
she didn't think too much about lending him a spare one she had, on her plan.

Hall was using that phone when Lori overheard him one night soon afterward. Purely by the way he was
talking, she could tell a female was on the other end of the line, with whom Hall was romantically linked.
Then she heard Hall say, "You know why I couldn't come bail you out." She also heard him say, "Your
dad," which made her think it was one of Hall's young players.

She had no proof of anything. But this episode, combined with what she called Hall's general
"elusiveness," was enough to compel her to end the relationship. "I was like, ‘This doesn't feel right at
all,'" she said.

Her entanglement with Hall wasn't over, however. At the end of the month, she had $150 in overages
on her phone bill, caused by 626 calls within a three-week-period between Hall and the person with
whom he had been speaking that night. That person, Lori soon learned after she repossessed the phone
and received multiple texts and one phone call, was rather obviously a teenage girl.

As grateful as she was that Hall was out of her life, she still wanted her $150 back, plus another $400 she
had loaned him. When she managed to get Hall on the phone to recover her money, he told her he was
out of town, in spring training with the Texas Rangers, embarking at the age of 46 on what he said would
be "the biggest comeback in the history of baseball." He said he was in Surprise, Fla., but would be back
in the Metroplex when the season started. Lori went online and learned that the Spring Training home
of the Texas Rangers was in Surprise, Ariz.

During their brief fling, Lori found it very peculiar that Hall had begun receiving his retirement pension
checks from Major League Baseball at her home. Soon, she received a legal notice, addressed to Hall,
that the mother of one of Hall's children was suing him for child support. Soon after, she received a note
saying that Hall's pension would be garnished.
"For months, [pension] checks were coming to my place, but after that, they were for zero dollars," she
said.

The checks were a monthly reminder of a bizarre chapter in Lori's life, and perhaps also a near miss:
Even though they were only casually dating, Hall had wanted to move into Lori's place "temporarily."
But Lori resisted. She didn't think it was appropriate for a man she had been dating so briefly to live with
her teenage son and daughter.

"I mean, thank God they were never alone," Lori said. "She [her daughter] always found him a little
creepy."

***

The teenage girl with whom Hall had spoken 626 times in less than a month was Sara Walsh*. She was
17 at the time of the phone calls, and played on a competitive youth softball team Hall now coached in
the Texas Glory organization, where the college scholarship ambitions of the girls were on par with the
girls on his basketball teams. Walsh, in fact, went on to play at a Division I school.

At around that time, in December of 2006, Frisco, Texas police responded to a report of a hostile
encounter in a car between an adult male and a much younger female in the parking lot of a Kohl's
department store. The officer asked both parties to produce IDs, and Mel Hall complied with the
request. Sara Walsh gave a fake name and a fake date of birth — she said she was 18, when in truth she
was 17 — but police quickly discovered she was lying and arrested her for giving false information.

It should be noted that the age of consent in Texas was 17. But the incident explains why Lori overheard
Hall saying into the phone, "You know why I couldn't come bail you out."

The following spring, while Sara played on Hall's softball team, Texas Glory administrator Dan Adkins,
who coached one of the other teams, "loaned" his daughter to Hall's team so they could have enough
players. Adkins' daughter happened to wear the same jersey number for her team as Sara did for hers,
which meant that their league-issued equipment bags, which featured their uniform numbers, looked
exactly the same.

Adkins went to fetch some equipment from what he thought was his daughter's bag. But it was really
Sara's bag, and inside Adkins found a card from Hall to Sara with a pre-printed poem. It was part love
letter, part apology. It read:

"That's why I'm hoping/ you'll help me peel away/ the parts that aren't right/ because underneath that/
is the greatest love I've ever known./ We're worth it./ I believe that/ with all my heart."

The card was signed, "Love you, Mel."

A PORTRAIT OF HALL AS A PREDATOR SNAPPED INTO CLARITY IN HIS MIND.

Prior to this moment, Adkins and Hall had been good friends: Adkins had even loaned Hall money on
many occasions. Sure, he found Hall's obsession with Hooters a bit off-putting — "Mel loved Hooters,
and that level of fan would recognize him, and he'd pick up the occasional Hooters girl," Adkins said —
but it was typical enough jock stuff. Hall had even once asked to move into his home temporarily, but
Adkins turned him down. Now, Adkins saw everything differently, and a portrait of Hall as a predator
snapped into clarity in his mind.
That night, Adkins fired Hall from the Texas Glory and told him he didn't want to hear about him
coaching girls ever again. According to Adkins, Hall responded by saying, "I'm a famous guy. I have a lot
of resources. Don't put your family at risk by saying things about me."

"And I just told Mel, ‘I'm a legal gun carrier. I'll take my chances.' I wasn't gonna let him intimidate me
from doing the right thing," Adkins said.

Adkins made copies of Hall's card to Sara and presented one to Sara's father. The father's response,
according to Adkins, was to tear up the paper and say, "Dan, I refuse to put my family through this."

Prior to Adkins' discovery of the letter, Sara had been living temporarily with family friends, the
Schmidts. When Adkins told the family's father what had happened, Mr. Schmidt showed him a stash of
written correspondence he had kept in the house between Sara and Hall. Adkins described these letters
as "extremely graphic" and "sickening." He thinks Schmidt kept them in case Sara ever decided to take
legal action in the future. Adkins also believes that Hall may have molested Schmidt's teenage daughter.

Both the Schmidt family and Sara, who is now 24, declined comment for this story.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE CONVICT

In June of 2009, in downtown Fort Worth, Mel Hall went on trial in the Tarrant County Criminal Court for
five counts of sexual abuse against Courtney Miller, including three counts for Aggravated Sexual Assault
of a Child Under 14. The trial only covered the accusations within Tarrant County, the location of the
apartment Hall rented with his girlfriend after moving out of the Miller's home. The accusations for the
assaults in Courtney's home, in neighboring Denton County, were being charged separately.

Prosecutors believed they had enough evidence to get convictions for the assaults of both Courtney and
Katie. (In both cases, no statute of limitations applied.) But because Courtney was under the age of 14
when Hall assaulted her and Katie was 14, a conviction for charges against Courtney carried a maximum
prison sentence twice as long.

Prior to the trial, Hall had issued subpoenas for some of the big names of his athletic past: Deion
Sanders, Don Mattingly and Buck Showalter. But he never had those subpoenas served, leading
prosecutors to believe that issuing them was merely an attempt to marshal the last vestiges of his name
recognition into a show of force.

At trial, Hall didn't take the stand on his own behalf, which was unsurprising to prosecutors: By law,
everything Hall might have done to any other girls — Katie, Jennifer, Dana, Kayla, Karen, Sara — was
inadmissible in the guilt/innocence phase of the trial, which is concerned solely with the crime at hand.
The only way these accusations could have been admitted would have been if Hall's defense team
opened the door with a character defense, as in, "Hall isn't the type of person to commit such a crime."
Hall had always liked to talk, and in an interview prosecutors expressed their belief that the possibility
he would inadvertently open the door on the stand was likely too large a risk for the defense. His high-
powered lawyers, who included Brady Wyatt, president of the Dallas Criminal Defense Lawyers
Association at the time and one of the most highly-regarded defense attorneys in the area, wisely kept
him quiet.

THEY TOLD HER HOW IMPORTANT IT WAS TO PUT AN END TO WHAT MEL HALL HAD DONE TO HER AND
COUNTLESS OTHERS.

All of this meant that the prosecution's case would succeed or fail almost entirely on the testimony of
Courtney. But seconds before she was supposed to approach the witness stand, she told prosecutors
she was too scared to go through with it.

"I was scared to death," she said. "I was like, ‘I can't do it. I can't do it.'"

Prosecutors soothed her and pleaded with her to follow through. They told her how important it was to
put an end to what Mel Hall had done to her and countless others. Courtney finally stepped up to the
stand. She was petrified, and her shoulders slumped. Seeing Hall in the courtroom was especially tough.

"I didn't want to see him. He had this real serious look on his face. I remember it when he coached me,"
she said.

To warm her up, prosecutors spent 20 minutes talking to her about basketball, the only thing she ever
felt comfortable talking about. Then the questions progressed to what had happened with Hall.
"I was like, 'I gotta step out of my shell and really do the right thing.' Otherwise it would've kept going,"
Courtney said.

The jury found her convincing. It helped that she, like Katie, had confided in three people in the
intervening years. The testimony of each was consistent with Courtney's accounts of the assaults.

Courtney's father testified as well. When he said, "My daughter's a good girl," he broke down crying.

The jury reached a guilty verdict on all five counts after 90 minutes of deliberation. When the verdict
was read, "Courtney had an instantaneous reaction to it," said Prosecutor Kim D'Avignon.

"All of a sudden she was looking me in the eye. Her shoulders went back. It was literally years of weight
off her shoulders."

***

Any doubt the jurors may have felt about their verdict was likely eliminated by the gallery of witnesses
and evidence presented during the trial's sentencing phase. Everything that would have been
considered prejudicial during the guilt/innocence phase — testimony by Jennifer and Katie, evidence of
Hall's relationship with Sara, love letters and jewelry receipts, among much else — came out during
sentencing, So did the fact that Hall had been arrested for domestic violence in the 1990s against one of
his prior wives, and that he had violated an order of protection the wife took out against him. Even
though the girls were subjected to cross-examination, they were unwavering. All of it added up to an
airtight case that identified Hall as a serial abuser.

Overall, there was compelling evidence that Hall had either abused or had improper relationships with
seven underage girls, spanning nearly two decades. The sheer volume of his crimes likely contributed to
Hall's getting the maximum allowable sentence: 45 years, with no possibility of parole until he serves
half his sentence. He was sentenced on June 17, 2009, which means he will be released in November,
2031, at the earliest. He will be 71.

"What was his weapon? Trust," said D'Avignon in her closing argument. "Over and over again, he shook
the hand of a parent and said, 'It's OK. I'll take care of them. I'll make her a better person.' Instead what
he did was rob them of their innocence and change the scope of their lives."
One of the many letters from Mel Hall to Jennifer Diaz that was presented as evidence. It reads:
"Jennifer, Everyday that I am away from you I want you to read this letter and you will always know that
I am with you. No one will ever come between us or love you like I do 2 1/2 years of love, hate, pain,
problems God has kept us together pray and ask him to take care of you and me. Love you more and
more each day and will be home soon. Your husband, Mel"
So voluminous was the evidence that prosecutors didn't feel the need to bring up every potential
witness against him. For instance, they never called a Montreal woman who said Hall sexually assaulted
her in the 1980s when she was a teenager and Hall was living in Montreal during the offseason with his
wife and daughter. The woman, Christina Fuoco, worked a seasonal holiday job in the same mall where
Hall operated batting cages. One day, she said, Hall offered her a ride in his Porsche. He exposed himself
to her several minutes in.

"He grabbed my head and pushed me on him. I pushed off, he pushed me back on. I pushed off, he
pushed on. And it was over almost as soon as it begun," Fuoco said in a recent interview.

Fuoco was shaken up after the encounter, but wouldn't have considered herself "traumatized." Still,
every few months she found herself Googling "Mel Hall." After learning he had been arrested, she
contacted Texas authorities, though she didn't testify at trial because she had recently given birth. The
sheer happenstance of her discovery hints at the probability that Hall victimized other women. Since
Hall was sentenced, she hasn't Googled his name.

For his part, Hall's defense witnesses consisted mostly of other youth coaches, a nanny who had worked
for him, one of his ex-wives and two of his children.

One ex-wife and their daughter both used the word "protector" to describe Hall, as if reading from the
same script.

"I've never felt more safe than being with him," the daughter testified. "Even though we don't live
together, we are still one big happy family. Him and my mom are best friends. He's one of my best
friends."

However, this image of familial closeness was undermined by the fact that both the mother and
daughter weren't aware of the existence of his youngest child, the one Courtney and Katie would
babysit.

The day after the trial, Prosecutor Christy Jack was summoned back up to court when she saw Hall's
daughter standing outside the courthouse. The young woman told Jack she wanted to speak with her.
Jack was immediately terrified.

"I've been doing this work for a long time, with a lot of dangerous people, and nobody has ever
physically assaulted me. But the way she was approaching me, it was like, ‘This is when this is gonna
happen,'" Jack said.

Jack gingerly walked toward Hall's daughter, prepared for the worst. The daughter hugged her, tightly,
and said into her ear, "Thank you."

"And I just thought, ‘Maybe she's another victim,'" said Jack.

***

The day after he was sentenced, Hall pled guilty in Tarrant County to the Criminal Sexual Assault of Katie
Bentley. The following year, he pled guilty in neighboring Denton County for the Criminal Sexual Assault
of Courtney. The pleas carried some benefits for Hall: Rather than having his sentences stacked on top
of each other, they would run concurrently. However, they likely didn't help his appeal for the
conviction of abusing Courtney, which he lost in 2010. (He claimed in his appeal that he had received
ineffective counsel, and that extraneous offenses were admitted at trial.)

He's now an inmate in the Allred Unit, in Iowa Park, Texas, some 130 miles northwest of the Metroplex.
The prison has a national reputation for brutality.

The day after he was sentenced, the same day he pled guilty to Katie's assault, he gave a jailhouse
interview to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He was as chirpy and defiant with reporter Deanna Boyd as
he'd been with reporters during his career.

"I DON'T BELIEVE I WAS PROVEN GUILTY OF THE CHARGE. I BELIEVE I WAS PROVEN GUILTY OF MY
LIFESTYLE."

"I've always gone to the beat of my own drum, basically, and that probably did not help me. Maybe
things would have been different if I was the straight-laced blue collar [type]. Who knows?" he said.

"I know I'm innocent and I don't believe I was proven guilty of the charge," he said. "I believe I was
proven guilty of my lifestyle."

He admitted to having a sexual relationship with Jennifer, but said he waited until she was of age.

"I'm playing for one of the biggest organizations in the world. There's no way they're going to allow
improprieties like that."

Asked about the finality of going to prison, his mood changed. "This is not like a rain delay, that the
game can be called and you start all over," he said.

***

Soon after Hall was sentenced, a pro-Hall website sprung up called [Link], which promised to
tell "The Real Story of Mel Hall Jr." To this day, authorities are not certain who was responsible. The site
aimed "to explain the atrocities of Mel Hall's case, increase awareness, inspire and empower prevention.
It is a warning for all coaches, teachers, day-care providers, and volunteers whom decide to teach our
youth. It is a warning for all professional athletes alike."

Hall's trial and sentencing did not prove that he was a serial sexual abuser of underage girls, the site
claimed. Rather, they "revealed that inter-racial [sic] relationships, a flamboyant lifestyle, and ...
‘wearing a nice suit' are not admirable in the state of Texas."

It accused both the prosecutors and the judge of numerous instances of malfeasance, and it also
included other discrediting information, such as the fact the judge had once been pulled over for
speeding with alcohol on her breath and empty beer cans in her car.

It also identified Katie and Courtney by first and last name. It claimed, "It was obvious [that] Katie, along
with several others, had been coached by the prosecution for years. Their acting in the courtroom was
poor and pleas to the jury transparent."

When authorities discovered that the site had mentioned victims' names, they contacted the web
hosting company and ordered it shut down. (Under Article 57.02 of the Texas Code of Criminal
Procedure, disclosing the name of a sex assault victim who was under the age of 17 at the time is a Class
C misdemeanor.)
AN INTERNET CAMPAIGN TO DISCREDIT THE YOUNG WOMEN AND TO CLEAR HALL'S NAME PERSISTS TO
THIS DAY.

Still, an Internet campaign to discredit the young women and to clear Hall's name persists to this day in
the comments of various blogs and articles that mention Hall's conviction. His defender, or, perhaps,
defenders, address even his minor moral offenses. On one blog, a commenter going by the name of
"BW," ostensibly for "Bernie Williams," wrote, "Stop speaking about Mel Calling me a Zero we are
friends and Always will be...."

On the topic of Jennifer, "BW" wrote, "She never got over him and that's Why he is in Jail Because of
these Gold diggers."

Hall's victims were shaken up by the anonymous sniping at first, but since then their attitude has
evolved into sickened quasi-amusement. The idea of a vast conspiracy theory to bring down Mel Hall is
almost as absurd as the idea that Hall, at age 46, would make the biggest comeback in the history of
baseball. The deluded grandiosity of the theory is in direct proportion to that of Hall himself. The notion
that the girls were after Hall's money is undermined by the fact that Hall was found indigent prior to his
appeal and was appointed an attorney by the court, and, more significantly, by the fact that neither
Courtney nor Katie have filed a civil suit against Hall.

Said Katie, "They kept trying to say that it was a conspiracy, and we were after his fame and fortune. But
he never was wealthy. He always needed money. He could never provide for himself at all."

Added Courtney, "At a certain point I was like, ‘Let them argue and do whatever they wanna do. I'm
moving on with my life.'"

Both have basically been able to do that, but there have been some unsettling moments. Late in 2013,
after becoming engaged, Katie received a typewritten letter with no return address. It read:

So you're engaged. How wonderful for you! I wonder if your finane [sic] knows everything about you. I
wonder if he knows all that you're capable of. I wonder if he knows how you conspired to send an
innocent man to prison for many years, destroying his life, hurting his children and his family. I wonder
how he would respond to hearing you lie under oath, taunt his daughters and dance around like a
teenager outside the courtroom.

Then, in early 2014, according to Katie, a heavyset woman with brown hair and brown eyes knocked on
her door. Her attire was professional, her demeanor cordial. She had one question for Katie: Would her
testimony about Mel Hall remain the same if there were a retrial? Katie was caught off guard, and didn't
think to do anything but respond that yes, it would. The woman thanked her, and left before Katie could
process what had just happened.

Several weeks before Katie was interviewed for this story, a woman who identified herself as Hall's wife
contacted [Link] after being notified of a request for an interview with Mel Hall (which Hall
subsequently declined). She wrote: "I appreciate your interest in my husband's story. That's the key. This
has to be HIS story. The prosecution and his accusers already had their turn."

The woman, Elizabeth Hall, announced on her Facebook page that she married Hall in July of 2013, four
years after he went to prison. Under the announcement, it says, "After all these years! Liz and Mel as it
always should have been!"
Katie was unaware of Mrs. Hall's existence. When showed her Facebook page, she snapped up in
recognition.

"Oh my God that is her!" she said. "Holy Cow, that's freaky."

When asked about this by email, Mrs. Hall denied ever contacting any of Hall's accusers, writing, "That
must have been another Mrs. Hall, or perhaps the woman he was with during the time of the trial," a
girlfriend she identified as "Tami." Mrs. Hall also claimed that "Tami" was responsible for [Link].
Contacted by phone on a Sunday morning in May, "Tami" said she was going to church and would call
back, but she never did. Subsequent voice messages were not returned.

There was more that Mrs. Hall wanted known: She had dated Hall in high school and had become
pregnant with his child in 1977, but put the baby girl up for adoption, a decision she called, "the great
heartache of my life." She said she hopes to some day connect with her biological daughter.

She and Hall fell out of touch after high school. Then, in 2009, according to Mrs. Hall's email, "I was at
work sitting at my desk when I received a very clear message in my head. A voice said very clearly,
‘Check on Mel, he's in trouble.'"

She went on the Internet and saw that Hall had been sentenced four days prior. "I had no doubt that
this was some kind of huge mistake," she wrote.

The two began a pen-pal correspondence, fell back in love, and got married. She moved to southern
Oklahoma, an hour and a half from the Allred Unit, to be close to him: "I love my husband and will stand
by him for as long as it takes," she wrote.

She wrote that she read the transcript of the trial and was "appalled by the inadequacy of his
attorneys." His conviction, she wrote, "was just accusations, no charges, no witnesses. Disgusting!
Outrageous!"

As for the motivations of his accusers, she suggested a conspiracy between two of his ex-wives.
However, she acknowledged, "This sounds like quite a soap opera. It's all hearsay on my part. I only
know what I've been told."

Mrs. Hall wrote that she is "working on trying to forgive those that did this to him. I encourage those
responsible to make things right with God and undo the evil that has been done here."

She added, "I look forward to reading your story. Hopefully I won't be disappointed."

***

Jennifer Diaz was reluctant to be interviewed for this article. She credits her Christian faith for enabling
her to progress from anger to forgiveness toward her parents, with whom she still maintains a
relationship, albeit a strained one. She worried that the article would dredge up the bad memories and
vilify her parents and even Hall. She didn't want to be put in a position of piling on.

"I JUST WANTED TO FACE YOU AND [LET] YOU KNOW THAT I KNOW THAT IT WAS WRONG AND YOU
DIDN'T GET AWAY WITH IT."

"My story is the aftermath," she said. "It's God rescuing me out of that horrible situation and healing
me."
But forgiveness wouldn't have been possible without fully reckoning with what happened. For years,
Jennifer was led to believe by people close to her that what Hall was doing to her was normal. It was an
important part of her journey to forgiveness to be able to say to Hall on the stand, "I just wanted to face
you and [let] you know that I know that it was wrong and you didn't get away with it. I'm here today —
20 years later — to look you in the eye."

For Katie, now a teacher and basketball coach, coming forward about Hall allowed her to confront what
she described as "the scared little girl feeling" she had carried since she was assaulted.

"Before I got it out in the open, it was that feeling of, ‘What did I do, what did I lose?' But now that
everything's out in the open, you just survive, you just move on. Like everybody has an awful past about
something," she said.

As a basketball team captain and now as a coach, Katie is a natural leader. Deciding to come forward
about Hall, and leading others to do the same, was the most important use of her leadership skills.

"Katie was our absolute hero," Prosecutor D'Avignon said. "Without her being like, ‘However bad this
happened to me, I can't let this happen to someone else,' without her being brave enough, we never
would have exposed all this."

A month after Hall was imprisoned for assaulting her, Courtney met a young man who would become
her first boyfriend, and then would become her husband. The couple now has a small child.

Prosecutors D'Avignon and Jack were invited to Courtney's wedding, but were unsure how to introduce
themselves to people because they didn't know if Hall's assault of her was known. But during Courtney's
father's wedding toast, he thanked them specifically, telling them, "You gave her back."

Although each remains protective of her privacy, Courtney, Katie, and Jennifer have worked to get to a
point where they have nothing to hide from people close to them. As Courtney put it, "I'm not glad that
it happened, but it's part of me now. And I'm happy with who I am."
The Sordid End of David Meggett

HE WAS AN ALL-PRO RUNNING BACK. HE BECAME A SERIAL RAPIST.

Jeanine Loveland was 26 and needed out of Ocean City. She had moved to the Maryland beach town
from her Pennsylvania home the moment she turned 18 to operate games at a carnival, working the
midway, but she had become bored with the scene. The partying and the drugs, once liberating, had
trapped her.

A small-boned girl with strawberry blond hair and fair skin, her eyes were big, blue and searching. She
was adventurous and aimless. One day in June of 2001, she said, "I just closed my eyes on a map and
landed on Charleston."

Within days of moving to South Carolina, she found work in a jewelry store and made some new friends.
She had been there two weeks when she and a girlfriend went out one Friday night to Mitchell's, a bar
on touristy Market Street. She had met a nice, older couple there the week before, and the place had a
salsa band. After sharing some wine, she and her friend headed over.

Tipsy, but not hammered. Loose, but not out of control. Typical stuff.

They met two men. She danced salsa with one of them while her friend, like her, a tiny blonde, talked
with the other. When her friend mentioned she was a caseworker at a middle school, the man told her
he used to be a pro football player and would be happy to volunteer. He was affable and friendly, his
build short and powerful. His name was David Meggett.

At some point, Meggett bought a drink for one of the girls, or maybe the other — memories of that
night would later prove difficult to pin down. After her friend left the bar, Loveland sipped the drink
intermittently, leaving it unattended for stretches of time while she danced. But at a certain point,
something changed. Her balance suddenly became off. The room started spinning. Other patrons
noticed her — her speech was "unintelligible," one would say later — and suggested that the bartender
cut her off.

"Time for you to pay up, bitch," she said Meggett told her on the way to the car.

This was beyond unusual for Loveland; it was unheard of. She was no amateur when it came to drinking.
"To this day, I've never gone from slightly tipsy to completely falling down," she said recently. From this
point forward, her memories are kaleidoscopic. "Everything's just flashes," she said.

She stumbled out of the bar, and fell hard into a nearby doorway. The nice, older couple that she knew
asked for her address so they could put her in a cab, but she refused to give it to them.

Meggett came out and helped her to her feet; it seemed like a chivalrous gesture at first. But then he
began leading her down the block. Loveland tried to push away, desperately trying to rally her severely
compromised strength and coordination. But Meggett, with one arm, hoisted her a few inches into the
air and continued down the block, to where he had parked his Porsche, the tops of Loveland's feet
dangling and scraping the concrete. Several years prior, Sport Magazine had named him the seventh-
strongest man in the NFL.
"Time for you to pay up, bitch," she said Meggett told her on the way to the car, presumably, she thinks,
in reference to the drink he'd bought earlier. His tone was strangely matter of fact and assured, the use
of "bitch" more casually dehumanizing than angry.

"That's when I realized — and pardon my French — but, ‘Holy shit, this is about to go down.'"

~ TWO ~

He was cute. A "Mighty Mouse" type, 5'7 in a game of behemoths. He first made it as a running back and
return man in 1989 for the New York Giants, a team famous in the era for its pulverizing physicality. You
couldn't help but like watching him dart and dash away from bigger defenders, improbably escaping one
dire situation after another. That sentiment was immortalized by ESPN broadcaster Chris Berman's
famous refrain: "Look-at-that-little-Meggett-run!"

When he retired from pro football in 1998, the North Charleston native — known as Dave publicly, but
called David by those close to him — was the NFL's all-time leader in punt return yards (he is currently
second). He was All-Pro three times and played in the Super Bowl twice, winning a ring with the Giants
in 1990.

Giants coach Bill Parcells didn't like him at first: "What do I need another midget for?" he sneered at
Giants general manager George Young after Young drafted Meggett in the fifth round from a little
known, Division I-AA school, Towson State. But Meggett, the Walter Payton Award winner as a senior,
scored a touchdown in his first pro game and by the end of that season made the Pro Bowl as the
league's leading punt returner. His signature moment came in the Giants' final regular-season game
against the Raiders, a 76-yard jitter-bugging, pinballing, weaving, stopping-and-starting-and-bursting
touchdown punt return that lit a freezing cold Meadowlands on fire, the crowd's Go! Go!
Go!exhilaration accentuated by the fact that he was the smallest guy on the field.

He was a badass little player. And, to those he played with, a great guy.

Look-at-that-little-Meggett-run!

He was a badass little player. And, to those he played with, a great guy. That's often a throwaway line
for former athletes to describe one another, but in Meggett's case, the specificity and consistency of
their descriptions lend sincerity to the cliché. He was a pleasant, smiling presence on the team, someone
who joked around, but took his craft seriously. He was a semi-star player, but he related to everyone,
star or scrub, offense or defense, black or white.

Mark Collins, a cornerback on those teams, said Meggett "walked around the locker room just shucking
and jiving and laughing. He had that embracing, funny element to him. And everybody gravitated to
him."

"He was always a happy, cheerful kinda guy," said Erik Howard, a nose tackle on those Giants teams.

As for red flags, they existed for those who were inclined to look, which nobody really was. Sure, he
liked the ladies a little too much — his own brother James describes him, descriptively and
nonjudgmentally, as a "womanizer" — but this isn't a unique trait among pro athletes.

There was a 1990 arrest for soliciting a prostitute, but he wound up being acquitted, and nobody found
the incident too alarming to begin with. "We made fun of him the next year during team stretch," said
Collins. Then in 1995, he was charged with domestic violence in an incident with a girlfriend, but was
acquitted once again, and in the pre-Internet days, the episode came and went from the news cycle
without sticking. When the judge ruled that Meggett had "exerted reasonable force to stop [the
girlfriend] from entering his home," it seemed a definitive rebuke to his accuser's assertion that he had
lifted her off her feet and thrown her on the concrete.

He famously became a Parcells favorite, a player whose thick skin could withstand the coach's needle,
one who avoided mistakes and injuries, and one whose willpower was his best attribute. Several years
after Parcells left the Giants, he became the Patriots' head coach. When Meggett became a free agent in
1995, Parcells brought him to New England.

Larry Kennan, the Patriots' offensive coordinator in 1997, said Meggett was "a wonderful guy to coach.
He was pleasant, happy, and played with emotion. He was extremely bright, and was as good at knowing
pass protection as anybody I've ever been around. He just had a wonderful street sense about who to
pick up and who not to pick up."

For half a decade, starting when she was 5 years old, Loveland was regularly sexually abused by
someone she would only describe as "not a family member." She turned to drugs and alcohol to cope:
She had her first drink when she was 11, was using drugs regularly by 13, and was in rehab by 16.

When she turned 18 and left home for Ocean City, she fell in with a group of heavy drug users. By
moving to Charleston, she wanted to leave behind the cocaine and heroin she'd sometimes snorted and
start fresh.

She's left with post-traumatic stress disorder and awful fragments of memory from that night.

Meggett may have had a predator's sixth sense that identified her as a target, but Loveland herself
thinks her bad luck owes less to her past than to her small stature, her resemblance to her friend with
whom Meggett had first been talking, and the fact that she was alone at the bar once her friend left.

"Wrong place, wrong time," is how she puts it. She's left with post-traumatic stress disorder and awful
fragments of memory from that night.

She remembers being forced into Meggett's car. Then she remembers lying flat on her back some place
she didn't recognize, with Meggett twisting her left hand across her back, pinning it underneath her as
he forcibly penetrated her. She remembers looking up past him, at wood beams on a ceiling. Was she
raped in an abandoned building? A gazebo in a park? She'll likely never know.

"At a certain point, I was like, ‘Just get it over with,'" she said. "You kinda leave your body. And since I
was drugged, I kinda had anyway."

Meggett finished, but Loveland's nightmare wasn't over. He picked her up and threw her back into the
passenger seat of his car. When she reached out to stop the door from closing, it closed on her hand,
which caused a spike of horrible pain and nerve damage she has lived with since. Then the car pulled
away. She had no idea where they were going, but she was fairly certain she was going to die.

This realization triggered a survival instinct. Her thoughts, theretofore scattered, focused on one
goal: Get out of the car.
At first, she couldn't find the door locks, but then it dawned on her that the door locks on a Porsche are
in the center console. She waited for a red light, and with her right hand still trapped, she reached her
left hand to the center console to unlock the door before reaching across herself to open it. Meggett
slowed down, but he didn't stop. Loveland, who had taken gymnastics as a kid, remembered the
mantra: "Tuck and roll."

Out of the car, implausibly on her feet. In some combination of shock and horrible pain, but standing.
She spotted two men, transient-looking types. Later, one of these men would swear in an affidavit that
he had drunk 12 to 15 beers. The two had seen some strange things in their day, but nothing like this: A
white girl tumbling out of a Porsche in the middle of the night on the black side of town.

"Help me!" she screamed, hysterical with fear. "I've just been fucked and I didn't ask for it! Please say
you're not gonna hurt me! Am I safe? Please say I'm safe!"

Meggett yelled, "Get back into the car!" then drove off a few seconds later, leaving Loveland crying on
the street.

The men called 911, and police arrived and took Loveland to the hospital. She was administered a rape
kit and given painkilling drugs. Police questioned her, but since her consciousness had been fragmented,
her memories were, too. She felt pressured by cops, and she wanted badly to go home. When she was
asked to describe a suspect, she described, in detail, Meggett's friend, with whom she had danced.

"You're asked so much stuff, and you're grasping at everything, and you're in a state of shock. I was
trying to give what I knew at the time," she said.

When she finally got home, she plopped onto her bed and turned on the television — and was greeted
by the image of Meggett. Despite Loveland's misidentification, witnesses at the bar had identified him,
and his arrest made the local news.

"That's him!" she thought to herself, and the memories of Meggett doing horrible things to her snapped
into clarity in her mind. So did a realization of what she was up against: Her rapist likely had resources
that she did not, and pursuing charges against him would bring her the worst kind of attention. Just
when she thought it was over, the episode had managed to get worse.

"I was like, ‘Why can't anything be normal in my life? Couldn't I have just been raped by an average
person?'"

That night, a police station check of Meggett's name revealed an incident from earlier that month filed
under "suspicious activity." The report concerned a 20-year-old female acquaintance who knew Meggett
as "Mike." She stated that "Mike" brought her to his house, gave her alcohol, then tried to kiss her and
shove his hand down her pants. When she rebuffed him and said she had to leave, "Mike" got angry and
refused to offer her a ride. She subsequently called police, but no charges were filed.

Football fans who had been paying attention may have recalled an incident that made the news several
years before. After the 1997 season, Meggett had been accused of raping a Toronto escort and stealing
back the money he had given her.

It took place during a bachelor party for Steve Brannon, an ex-Patriot and Giants practice squad player
who at the time was playing for the Canadian Football League's Toronto Argonauts. Brannon hired an
escort he'd previously patronized to share with Meggett, and rented a room at the Royal York, a grand
old hotel on the Toronto lakefront.

Meggett walked into the room with his winning, short-guy strut and eager smile, and sized up the
escort, 33-year-old Betty Huryn. The mother of a small child, she was 5'9 and curvy, with dyed blond
hair. Meggett beamed and said, "It's party time!" before throwing down a wad of $480 in cash. It was
February after a long season. The body was healing up. The sport's regimentation and brutality were
many months away. He had earned this.

He put a condom on and commenced the party, he and Brannon taking turns, going hard. Football
players are physical machines who lease their bodies out to a business of pain, a perfect match for an
industry in which bodies are leased out for pleasure. Everyone knew the deal. Then Meggett's condom
broke and Huryn told him to stop.

Meggett's response was to laugh, and keep going. Huryn told him again, but this time Meggett grew
irritated. Who was this hooker dictating terms to him, only a year removed from the Pro Bowl? Didn't
she know she wasn't dealing with the average John?

"Meggett said the Patriots test him for AIDS all the time and I wouldn't catch anything," Huryn later told
the Boston Herald. "He had a real attitude, like he was something special because he's a football player
who gets tested."

He slapped her across the face several times — "from one side of my ear to the other — boom, boom,
boom."

Meggett continued, Huryn resisted, and Brannon held her arms down. Once teammates, always
teammates. "I couldn't believe Steve wasn't stopping him. He's supposed to be my friend," Huryn told
the Herald.

She was finally able to wiggle free before Meggett finished, and she ran into the bathroom to rinse off
and collect herself. When she emerged, Meggett was angrily fishing through her coat pockets for the
$480 he had given her. She protested, but by this point Meggett had had enough. He slapped her across
the face several times — "from one side of my ear to the other — boom, boom, boom. And Steve is just
standing there. That's when the tears started," she said to the Herald.

She fled the room and was spotted by other hotel guests and staff, who called police. She was taken to
the hospital, where she was tested for STDs and given a quadruple dose of morning after pills.
Meanwhile, Meggett and Brannon went out drinking. When Meggett was later arrested, a police source
told the Herald that Meggett worried that the handcuffs would scratch his watch.

He hired one of the best and most expensive lawyers in Canada. Soon after, his defense team started
smearing the alleged victim. Nine days after the incident, an article appeared in the Herald headlined,
"Meggett accuser evicted for nonpayment in '95."

"She's a liar," her former landlord told the paper about the "admitted call girl," which was and still is a
legal profession in Canada. "She would say she had the money and then she wouldn't give it to us."
Prosecutors ultimately declined to pursue the rape charge, proceeding only with charges for assault and
theft. A trial resulted in a hung jury, and authorities, citing limited resources, declined to try Meggett
again.

"There were some inconsistencies in the complainant's testimony. It wouldn't have been a clear-cut
prosecution," Calvin Barry, the prosecutor, said.

"And if you come to court, in the perception of the jury, with ‘unclean hands,' it's difficult. Some jurors
go, ‘She's a big girl, she should have known what she was getting into.'"

Meggett might have beaten the charges, but he didn't escape the episode unscathed. The Patriots
released him before the 1998 season, adhering to team policy under owner Bob Kraft that violence
against women would not be tolerated. Two years before, the Patriots had drafted Christian Peter, a
defensive tackle from Nebraska with a history that included sexual assault, only to dump him several
days later.

"It was Bob Kraft's mantra," Don Lowery, the Patriots public relations man at the time, told me. "When
that incident happened, it was so egregious. And he liked David. You couldn't help liking him." Head
coach Pete Carroll told a reporter, "If you see a pattern developing, at some point you have to decide if
that pattern is taking you down the wrong road. We can't dictate behavior, but we can decide whether
we want somebody to be part of what we're doing."

Meggett was picked up late in the 1998 season by his old ally, Parcells, who by then had moved on to
the New York Jets. He hardly played, and after the Jets were eliminated from the playoffs, Meggett
wasn't re-signed by the Jets or any other team. Just two years after making the Pro Bowl, Meggett was
done at age 32.

The rest of the league had finally seemed to reach the same conclusion as the Patriots. In light of the
Toronto incident, Meggett's history with women looked more like a rap sheet than what had always
been dismissed with a "boys-will-be-boys" shrug and an eye roll about gold diggers. Perhaps his
womanizing had been darker than previously thought, less the excesses of a charming, young athlete
who could sweet talk girls and more of a compulsion. One ex-girlfriend said he had a "love and sex"
addiction. But the domestic violence charge hinted at a capacity for violent rage toward women, and the
solicitation arrest now seemed like an early indication of an uncontrollable, destructive sex drive, as well
as a deep-seated attitude that women were disposable sex objects.

There was this, too: nine out-of-wedlock children he eventually fathered with eight different women.

There was this, too: nine out-of-wedlock children he eventually fathered with eight different women.
They now range in age from 8 to their 30s. Many are Facebook friends with each other.

Meggett was involved in their lives about as much as his own father, who abandoned the family when
David was still in the womb, was in his. The 1997 Patriots media guide listed Davin Meggett, a 23-year-
old running back on the Washington Redskins practice squad at the end of the 2013 season, as his only
child.

"He said those women were groupies. He never intended to have a child with them, so he didn't look at
it as his child," said one former girlfriend.
Consequently, he was constantly being chased down for child support payments, which he treated as a
minor inconvenience that didn't impact his sunny, upbeat disposition. In 1997, a woman sued Meggett
for non-support of his 21-month-old daughter; two weeks before, Meggett had refused to put the child
on his health insurance. Yet on one morning before court, Meggett arrived early to sign autographs for
the court staff. The guy stiffing a small child was acting the part of the generous prince.

During that trial, Meggett, who had initially denied he was the child's father, broke down crying,
claiming that reading the Bible had led him to a moral epiphany. The display of remorse worked:
Although he was being sued for $60,000 a year in child support, the judge reduced the payments to just
$22,500.

On another occasion, before a 1997 game in Jacksonville, after welching on child support, Meggett was
served with a writ of ne exeat from Florida marshals, preventing him from leaving the state until he
posted a $25,000 bond. He paid the bond in the team hotel before the game, then went out and played
well in a big Patriots victory.

These incidents showed, and also perhaps reinforced, Meggett's extraordinary capacity for
compartmentalization and denial, an acute ability to walk around untethered to reality. As one ex-
girlfriend described it, Meggett could "put things out of his brain like it wasn't really happening."

After his career ended, Meggett depended on this ability more and more. As child support payments
swiftly reduced the approximately $10 million he earned playing football to nothing, he remained
outwardly carefree. The attribute also came in handy for someone who occasionally did horrible things,
but liked to present himself as a caring person.

"He was like the perfect guy. Except he was a total liar."

To the girlfriends he rampantly cheated on and often wound up leaving to raise his children on their
own, he was a Prince Charming, an attentive boyfriend who made sweeping, romantic gestures. Once he
left elaborate rose petal pathways in the house, leading to signs, one after the other, saying, "Follow"
"The Way" "To My Heart." Another time he showed up at a girlfriend's workplace cafeteria on
Valentine's Day with a lobster dinner and flowers. Another time he drove for hours just to replace a
worn out pair of sandals. He was a good listener, sensitive and empathetic, a man who knew what
women wanted.

"He was just a nice guy ... He was sweet. He was romantic. He was like the perfect guy," one ex said to
me. "Except he was a total liar. If you told him the sky was blue, he'd say it was green.

"He made you fall in love with him and then it was too late when the bad things came to light."

How much of the good stuff was genuine and how much was manipulation? Was Meggett a well-
meaning guy with some horrible outlier moments of inexplicable behavior, or was he a cunning
sociopath with the ability to convince people that he would be the last person on earth to commit the
heinous crimes he was repeatedly accused of?

Several months after the Toronto rape incident, reporters sought out an ex-girlfriend, the mother of
Meggett's daughter, who had taken him to court the previous year. They likely expected to encounter
an embittered woman relishing the chance to pile on. But no.
"It doesn't sound like him at all," she told the Boston Herald of the attack. "But then, he wouldn't be the
first athlete that was ever taken advantage of.

"There are a million people out there," she added, "who will say something to get a piece of someone's
fame."

The prosecution of Loveland's case was problematic from the start. Her initial misidentification of her
attacker and the likely fact that she was drugged at the time compromised the case. Under South
Carolina law, an inebriated victim is a factor that allows a third-degree sexual assault charge, which
carries a maximum prison sentence of only 10 years, compared to a maximum of 30 years for a first-
degree charge.

But in the weeks following the incident, the case became even more compromised when two key
witnesses drastically changed their stories about that night.

The first was Kenneth Brown, one of the two men who witnessed Loveland leaping from Meggett's car
and called 911. The initial police report read, "Note that [Brown] was present at 259 Rutledge Ave. when
the victim jumped out of the suspect's vehicle ... The victim began screaming ‘Let me out' and jumped
from the moving vehicle." His account was essentially the same as that of the other man present,
Sylvester Magwood.

However, several weeks later, in a sworn affidavit, Brown painted a completely different picture — one
Loveland believes was coached by Meggett's defense. In Brown's new account, the car stopped, and
Loveland opened the door and simply stepped out. "The girl never complained that she had been hit or
assaulted in any way," he wrote. "Her dress was not torn or even messed up. She never complained that
the driver of the Porsche had raped her or physically forced her to do anything. There was nothing
unusual about her appearance."

Brown didn't account for why Loveland would have gotten out of the car in a strange neighborhood or
abruptly started screaming. The statement ended: "I would say that I thought she was drinking but I
certainly didn't think she was intoxicated."

The statement of Anthony Blackmore, the doorman for the bar, underwent a similar transformation.

At 2:30 a.m. the night of the incident, Blackmore wrote in a witness statement that he had seen
Loveland leave the bar "stumbling, really ‘cause she was so drunk." After Meggett helped her up,
Blackmore testified that, "I saw her trying to push him away, using her forearm toward his side ... He had
his arm around her by her shoulder, kinda keeping her from falling over."

But in his affidavit several weeks later, Blackmore portrayed Meggett and Loveland as an affectionate
couple, stating, "They held hands ... When they walked by me, nothing happened that seemed
inappropriate or out of the ordinary... Mr. Meggett did not grab or hold the girl in any improper way.
Mr. Meggett appeared to be sober, friendly, and courteous. He did not do anything to raise concern or
suspicion."

For his part, Meggett, in his only statement on the matter, made to the detective who arrested him,
admitted he had sex with Loveland and that she was drunk, but he said that she seemed "okay."
Meggett claimed that as he was driving Loveland home, shifting the manual gearshift of his car,
Loveland grabbed at his hand and said, "I like how you shift your gears, I'd like to see your other gear
shift." Then Loveland climbed on top of him and the two had sex. It was only after he pulled over to ask
for directions from Brown and Magwood that Loveland jumped out of the car and suddenly began
screaming.

Loveland said she finds the gearshift line "Sickly hilarious. I mean, which porn is that from?"

A TIMELINE OF DAVID MEGGETT'S HISTORY

There is a saying in law enforcement that for the victim of a rape, testifying at trial is the second-worst
thing that will ever happen to them. This helps explain why, according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest
National Network, just 40 percent of rapes are reported to police. Only 8 percent ever lead to an arrest,
and just 3 percent result in the rapist spending a day in prison.

In the weeks following the attack, Loveland researched Meggett's past on the Internet. She read about
the 1998 Toronto incident, and what she discovered alarmed her: "I knew he had done this before and
he got away with it, so why would it be any different with me?" The sudden reversal of Brown's and
Blackmore's testimony seemed to confirm the power of Meggett's resources. Not insignificantly, he had
retained as his counsel a high-profile, and highly-paid, defense attorney, Bart Daniel, a former U.S.
Attorney appointed by the first President Bush. Loveland, with her paycheck from the jewelry store,
couldn't compete with that firepower. She feels that the civil attorneys she retained capitalized on her
naiveté and pushed her toward a settlement she didn't really want. Because she chose not to proceed
forward with the criminal proceedings, prosecutors dropped the charges.

"It was ‘He has money, he has this. It's a he-said, she-said thing. Your past is gonna be brought up. There
are no guarantees if you go to trial.' They kept plugging, ‘You're the poor victim, you don't want this to
continue.'"

One of her attorneys said, "You can get some nice new outfits."

The settlement was for less than $100,000, but Meggett was just as delinquent in paying Loveland as he
was with the mother of his children. Loveland didn't see a dime at first.

After he defaulted, on both the cash payment and several other terms, like agreeing to undergo
counseling, Loveland sued him in civil court and won a $1.5 million judgment. But Meggett was largely
tapped out by this point, and authorities had to seize his house to come up with as much money as they
could. Loveland, after lawyer fees, eventually came away with about $80,000.

The attack had sent her into depression, and she used the settlement money to enable a prolonged
stretch of inactivity and substance abuse. She didn't work for two years, using the money to pay her
rent, supply her drug habit and buy a truck. Within four years, the money was gone.

The money tethered her to Meggett, enhancing her sense that he was always lurking and would never
really leave.

"I don't know how to explain this to people, but it didn't feel good to have it. I lived off it, but it enabled
my darkness," she said.
The money tethered her to Meggett, enhancing her sense that he was always lurking and would never
really leave. It's a common symptom of rape victims dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. In
Loveland's case, it was exacerbated by seeing Meggett on television the day after she was raped by him,
and then by a creepy coincidence several months after the attack: While driving her car during a rare
trip outside the house, she pulled up to a red light. A moment later, Meggett's Porsche pulled up beside
her in the other lane.

"I just froze, waiting for the light to turn," she remembers. Meggett didn't notice her, or if he did, he
didn't acknowledge it.

Through the years, Meggett, or the memory of him, has repeatedly popped up out of nowhere for
Loveland, unleashing an overwhelming flood of emotions. In 2006, five years after the attack and after
she enrolled in college and made straight A's her first semester, Meggett's name surfaced again when he
was charged with another sex crime. And in 2010, nearly a decade after the incident, Loveland was
subpoenaed to testify in a trial for another Meggett rape the previous year. (She wound up never being
called.) Then, even after Meggett was imprisoned, and that chapter of her life seemingly closed, I
contacted her on Facebook, out of the blue. She hasn't slept well in the several weeks since.

"You're approaching me after so many years, and it's like, ‘This guy is never gonna leave'," she said.

"He's become a part of my life, and it's still aggravates me. Like, when I'm watching football, and I hear
the [FOX NFL jingle], I think of him. And it's like, ‘That fuckin' Meggett.'" Another victim I spoke with said
she still has nightmares about Meggett.

Her constant fear fed on itself, and over time Meggett's significance grew in her mind. In the intervening
years, as more incidents of his sex crimes surfaced, she followed them closely, even commenting about
him on various sports blogs.

"I felt I needed to know everything I could about him. The more you know about somebody, the more
you know where they are, the safer you can feel, in some strange way."

Along with fear, Loveland also carries indignation and anger toward all the players and factors involved
that resulted in her settlement. She said she feels cheated "in certain ways," by her attorneys, by the
witnesses who changed their testimonies, and by what she calls "the system" in general: of patriarchy,
of athlete idolization, and of a justice system not blind to the influence of money and status.

Lastly, despite herself and all the not-your-fault-reassurances of the world, she also has carried guilt.
Although there was no way for her to foresee it, three women would accuse Meggett of rape after her
settlement. Given the statistics about how seldom rapes are reported, it's an open question how many
women Meggett may have actually attacked.

"I always felt somewhat responsible," Loveland said. "If they would have followed through with
everything in 2001, maybe everything else wouldn't have happened."

When Davin Meggett (pronounced DAY-vin) spoke with me on the phone in early November, he had
been released by the Dallas Cowboys' practice squad several days before, and would be signed to the
Washington Redskins' practice squad five days later.
Despite the instability of his career, his demeanor is relentlessly upbeat, assertive and genial. This is true
even on the subject of his father, who he hasn't seen since 2008, and about whom his feelings are
conflicted, but ultimately loving. During our conversation, his remarks on his father careened all over the
place, reflective of the internal wrestling match between his need to love his dad and the knowledge, at
least partially acknowledged, that he has done horrible things.

"What he did wasn't excusable, it was disgusting, it was wrong, it was unforgiveable. But he's not that
nature of a man."

Davin, who was primarily raised by his stepfather, said Meggett was "a great father." But he also
characterized him as "a distant uncle figure."

"It's my impression that whatever happened to my dad, and whatever my dad did, wasn't his fault," he
said. "I think people in his situation would have done things too." But then he said, "What he did wasn't
excusable, it was disgusting, it was wrong, it was unforgiveable. But he's not that nature of a man."

As to the specifics of the crimes, including the one that eventually put him in jail, he said, "Do I think he
did it? I think he did something. I don't think he did what the police said, or the woman said. He may
have hit her, but I don't think he did it to the extent that he had to go away for 30 years. He could've put
his hands on her violently; he's an explosive athlete. I'm not gonna say he didn't hit her. But it wasn't a
Floyd Mayweather jab to the throat. Maybe he just pushed her into the wall or something like that."

Davin repeatedly referenced his father's giving, generous nature, echoing the sentiments of other
people close to Meggett. "If he cares about you, he's gonna go out of his way to take care of you. He's
really been a best friend to 40, 50 different people." For long stretches, said Davin, his father has
supported various family members.

Although this description doesn't square with someone who has been sued repeatedly for failing to
support his children, maybe, when looked at a certain way, it's all actually consistent. Maybe Meggett
had been giving since even before he got his first NFL paycheck, and, after so many years and so many
people, maybe he began to think he had given enough.

Or, as Davin said, "He did the best he could. I mean, you try raising nine kids in four states, with no
money."

Whether that giving was voluntary or court-mandated, by the mid-2000s, Meggett was all gived out, and
broke. Not long after his career ended, his child support payments — and his settlement with Loveland,
and legal fees and possible other payouts — finally began to outrun that little Meggett. He opened up a
Subway franchise, which ultimately folded, and got a job as an assistant football coach at American
International College in Springfield, Mass. It was not enough to balance his checkbook.

Davin and others said it was the child support that did Meggett's finances in, and not a spendthrift
lifestyle often associated with athletes who go broke. "He splurged a little, but not anything extravagant
and drastic," Davin said.

"It went from me spending summers in a big house with a pool, with three cars, living the dream, to
then living in a townhouse. Then it was a one-story, two-bedroom trailer house, with one car that's not
even his, and him not having money to send me home."
In 2005, the money was just about gone and Meggett put his Super Bowl ring up for sale on eBay for
$40,000. That same year, while living in Greenville, N.C., with a girlfriend, he took a job nearby as the
recreation director in tiny Robersonville, N.C., which a municipal employee described to me as "a
Podunk, 2,000-person town that people come to when they're at a last resort." His salary, employees
told me, was about $27,000, most of which immediately was diverted into child support payments.
Davin, perhaps exaggerating, told me that his father saw 6 cents of every check. He even took a second
job, working nights in the 24-hour booth of a gas station.

Before he was hired as recreation director, the town's police chief did a background check as a routine
matter. When he saw Meggett's record, he notified the town manager, assuming it would disqualify him
for a job working with children.

"But he didn't want to hear that shit," Chief Darrell Knox, said of the town manager's reaction. "He
thought it would be good for the community. A black, ex-football player, he came up hard. And the town
manager has always been a big sports guy."

After all, Meggett was still the star athlete who came across as a nice guy. In Robersonville, as ever, this
led to preferential treatment and a second chance. And Meggett made the most of it, organizing youth
sports leagues and acting the same pleasant, generous person he was during his better moments.

"To be honest, he did a great job," Knox told me. "As far as organizing trips, having kids and parents
show up, he was the best. We have poor children, broken homes. But he could work the neighborhood,
talk to parents."

Outwardly, he was an upstanding citizen in a small town. But his personal life was unraveling.

Outwardly, he was an upstanding citizen in a small town — "very mannerly," as the town librarian told
me. But his personal life was unraveling. Along with his loss of money and prestige was the fact that a
longtime girlfriend, and the mother of another one of his children, had dumped him, and had recently
started seeing another man. Perhaps this string of humiliations helps explain Meggett's behavior one
night in August of 2006, when he walked unannounced into the house the couple once shared.

The seminal book on the psychology of rapists is Nicholas Groth's "Men Who Rape: The Psychology of
the Offender." Although Groth's theories are not universally accepted without question, they helped
crystallize the idea that rape is more about power than sex. Groth wrote: "When a person feels
powerless in regard to controlling his life, he can defend against the discomfort of such an experience by
asserting control over someone else."

It's impossible to categorize Meggett with authority, but according to the typology of serial rapists
developed by Groth, Meggett, like many rapists, appears to straddle two categories: That of the power-
assertive rapist, who rapes as an assertion of his entitlement and status and on the assumption that
women owe him sex; and the anger-retaliatory rapist, who is motivated by getting even for real or
imagined wrongs. The night he visited his ex, both complexes may have been in play.

Soon after arriving, Meggett aggressively questioned her about her plans for the evening. When he
learned she would be seeing the new man, he told her he had a gun in his car.

"And that's when he shoved me down," her written police statement read.
Meggett used the same hold on his ex as he had used on Loveland. With the victim flat on her back, he
twisted her left arm under her and held it with his left hand, while keeping his right hand free to
unbuckle his pants and hers.

After it was over, her phone rang. Meggett answered it, to silence. He surmised it was the other man,
and said into the phone, "Whoever this is, I'm gonna kill you."

Then he turned to the victim and said, "I don't know if OJ did it, but I understand how he felt." Then he
head-butted her. Doctors saw red marks on her forehead head and neck when she went to the hospital.

He resigned as recreation director after the allegations became public. One town employee described
the episode as "a real black eye on the town."

But he got away with it. Again.

A source familiar with the victim's motives said she felt betrayed by law enforcement's willingness to
reveal the intimate details of the attack to newspapers. Greenville, N.C., isn't a big place, and even
though her name wasn't published, virtually everyone in her orbit knew she was the victim because she
was known to be the mother of Meggett's child. For that reason, she was not entirely cooperative with
police, and in her traumatized, conflicted state, she even donated $20 to Meggett's "canteen" fund
while he was in jail.

The fact that Meggett and the victim had dated itself meant that the case would be more difficult to
prosecute. Meggett's version of events, which was basically that the sex was rough and hostile, but
ultimately consensual, put it in the he-said, she-said category, and made prosecution problematic. The
charges were eventually reduced to misdemeanor sexual battery. Meggett was required to register as a
sex offender, but the penalty included no prison time.

Meggett left the state, but neglected to register as a sex offender. Meanwhile, according to a source,
the victim basically stopped functioning for several months, living out of her car for fear of being alone
in her home. During this period, she was unable to care for the child she had had with Meggett, and
turned the child over to her parents' care.

Jobless and all but broke, Meggett, the absent father of nine kids, moved back to South Carolina. He was
living in Summerville, but spending much of his time in his hometown of North Charleston, a separate
city from Charleston, and one that bears scant resemblance to its genteel, foodie paradise neighbor. The
city smells of toxic chemicals released by a large paper mill, and according to FBI data, is considered one
of the most dangerous cities in the United States. It's much the same today as it was when his own
absent father of eight kids walked out decades before, leaving his mother to try to make it work on her
wages as a short-order cook.

David was the youngest. The mama's boy, the charmer, the star athlete. He avoided the pull of the
streets, telling his siblings he was going to play college football, and by sheer force of will, he had
succeeded in getting out. But that willpower, when corrupted by his compulsions, now landed him back.

Without structure, status, money or any other trappings of respectability, his crimes became more
brazen and baldly predatory.
His rap sheet prevented him from getting a job, so he did some manual labor that his brother James
helped set up. As ever, he continued to work hard. Also as ever, he continued to prey on women.
Without structure, status, money or any other trappings of respectability, his crimes became more
brazen and baldly predatory.

His next alleged victim was a 17-year-old girl with a troubled past involving drugs and the means to pay
for those drugs. Prosecutors euphemistically refer to her as a person "known to law enforcement."

Meggett befriended and helped her out in small ways: a meal here, some cash there. It was either the
last vestige of the generous instinct people had always recognized in him or confirmation that that
generous instinct was only a ruse he used to manipulate. Recall that in 2001, before he raped Loveland,
he bought a drink and told her friend that he'd be happy to volunteer at the school where she worked.

The 17-year-old knew him as "Michael," similar to the name "Mike" he had used with the 20-year-old
victim back in 2001, before Loveland. Was Michael his predator alter ego? An alias so he could act with
impunity? Or just a name he used so people wouldn't Google him and see the crimes he'd committed
and how far he'd fallen?

One morning in September of 2008, he invited her to breakfast and picked her up in his car. On the way
to breakfast, he said he had to stop by his sister's house. He invited her inside, and took her into a
bedroom whose walls, sheets and pillows all were a matching shade of cheery pink. There, the 42-year-
old Meggett raped the girl, without a condom, using his signature hold: one hand pinning the victim's
twisted arm behind her back and one hand free.

"[The victim] stated that she continued to tell the suspect no and begun [sic] to get louder, hoping
someone would hear her. The suspect placed his hand over the victim's mouth, with one hand holding
her right arm down with his other," read the police report.

It was important that the victim keep quiet, because Meggett's sister was sleeping upstairs.

Meggett then drove the victim back to her home. The two didn't exchange a word about it in the car,
the spasm of violence and cruelty reduced to a minor blip in the day for a guy who liked to do favors.
The victim phoned police soon after.

Once again, Meggett faced another charge — "You guys had bonded me out in '01," he said to the bail
bondsman he called from jail. But once again, there were problems with the case. The victim wasn't an
ideal witness from the start because of her troubled past. Then, several weeks after the incident with
Meggett, she reported to police that another man had committed a separate act of sexual violence
against her only to recant the statement later.

"That would have portrayed her as someone who's always crying rape, which would have destroyed us,
considering the victim's credibility is the whole case," said prosecutor Chad Simpson.

Meggett had now been formally accused of raping four women: The first was an escort, the second was
drugged and couldn't remember anything but scattered details, the third was an ex-girlfriend, the fourth
had a spotty past that aroused suspicion. Meggett conformed to the notion that the serial rapist chooses
victims who will make less-than-ideal accusers, thus enabling him to strike again.
Simpson and his fellow prosecutors were aware of Meggett's record and badly wanted to get him off the
street, but they weren't optimistic they could do so with the latest charges. Sadly, a better case would
soon come their way.

Stacy Hooper would be later identified in news reports as a "student at the College of Charleston," but
that was misleading. The 21-year old was struggling to cobble together enough money to take a few
classes. She lived with roommates in a run-down house in a dangerous neighborhood in North
Charleston. In other words, she wasn't the typical scion of Southern wealth that populates the
downtown campus in the charming antebellum town.

She is also gay, a fact which, along with her poverty, perhaps gave her more empathy than most for
people others perceive as outcasts or who are marginalized. Such as "Mike," who hung around with her
and her friends, particularly a girl she was dating. He seemed like a nice enough guy. He would
occasionally loan them some cash and give them a ride when they needed it. Sure, it was weird for a
middle-aged guy to be hanging out with a bunch of kids. But Hooper tolerated weird better than most.
She had heard rumors that he used to be a football player, but she didn't think much of it, and she didn't
ask too many questions.

"All I knew is that he said he had warrants in either Georgia or North Carolina, he said he had fucked up.
I felt sorry for him so I didn't ask what they were for, it just seemed like he needed friends," she later
wrote in a police statement.

When Hooper broke up with her girlfriend, and needed $200 to keep the electricity on in the house,
Mike paid the bill. The two even once had halting, drunken sex when Hooper "was going through a 'bi'
stage," she wrote.

But several months went by and the two hadn't seen each other. Until she awoke after midnight one
night to find Mike sitting on the edge of her bed, demanding repayment for the $200 bill he had
covered.

Here was Meggett's twisted moral justification, his hook. That was his $200, and Hooper had taken it.
Such an indignity could justify, when looked at a very specific way unique to Meggett's mind, retribution
in the form of violent, forced sex.

"Don't fuck with me and my money," he told Hooper, according to her statement.

Sex and money had been intertwined in these attacks for more than a decade, stretching back to 1998 in
the Toronto hotel: When the escort asked him to stop, thus withholding sex, Meggett took her money.
For Loveland, too, after he bought a drink for her and her friend, it was time to "pay up, bitch." He
bought alcohol for the 20-year-old back in 2001 before trying to force himself on her — she owed him.
Several months before he found himself on Hooper's bed, he raped a 17-year-old on the way to buy her
breakfast.

"I'm gonna get a down payment now," he told Hooper.

Feelings of inadequacy for that abandonment could be appeased through fucking and baby making,
whether consensual or forced.
Maybe it all went back to his father's abandonment of the family he sired, that original unpaid debt.
Feelings of inadequacy for that abandonment could be appeased through fucking and baby making,
whether consensual or forced. Mastery through repetition.

Rape also enabled Meggett to affirm his physical prowess, a hallmark of the power-assertive rapist. That
physical prowess was his identity, and in combination with his own willpower, had enabled him to
escape the poverty his father had left him in, earning all the money and gaining all the access to sex
anyone could ever need. But now he was back near where he began, just another broke guy who
couldn't provide for his kids, the only thread connecting him to his past lifestyle was the $200 owed to
him by a 21-year-old desperate to keep the lights on.

When Hooper resisted, Meggett grabbed her neck and choked her. Then he pinned her, using the same
arm-twisting hold that he'd used with the others.

"It hurt really bad," she wrote. "I was crying, telling him to stop he was hurting me. I couldn't fight any
more and he was able to get my pants off."

When he was close to finishing, he pulled out and ejaculated into a towel. He had been through this
before and knew about DNA. He threw Hooper's pants at her and then left the house abruptly, taking
the soiled towel with him: "I'm gone."

But just outside the door, his conscience beckoned. Or perhaps in post-orgasmic clear-headedness, no
longer sick with rage and desire, he realized he had committed a serious crime that could put him away
for a long time and that he'd better start making nice with Hooper. With him, it was always hard to
distinguish between legitimate and calculated kindness.

He addressed her through her front window. "'Mike' kept saying he was sorry and, would I forgive him?
He said he was wrong and that we were friends."

After Meggett left, Hooper went to the hospital, and Meggett called her several times to apologize.
Meanwhile, doctors found marks on her neck and vaginal abrasions that corroborated her version of
events. Hooper arranged with cops for them to overhear Meggett's apologies on the phone, and for
Meggett to come to the hospital to check on her.

"She played into his hopes that if he acted like the ‘nice guy,' she wouldn't go forward. And he figured if
he was standing right there, she'd be less likely to tell the detective what actually happened," Simpson,
the prosecutor, said.

But he didn't get that far: Right after he got to the hospital, cops arrested him in the lobby. The next
time he would see Hooper was in a courtroom. He was not offered bail. That little Meggett, whose
playing and post-playing days alike had been defined by narrow escapes, sat in jail for 21 months
awaiting trial.

The low-point for Loveland came one night in 2005. She had been dating a man who had cheated on her
nine months before. That night, the man left the home they shared to attend the birth of the child he
had fathered. Loveland stayed home, profoundly depressed and alone.

The next morning brought a purified outlook. She resolved that she was done. Done with the self-
destructive behavior. Done letting Meggett, drugs and other shitty guys define her life. She started
thinking of herself less as a victim and more as a survivor: The former lets things happen to them, the
latter has taken control.

So she moved away from Charleston to Murrells Inlet, S.C., about an hour-and-a-half north, and found
steady work as a nanny. She saved enough money to take some college classes, and she's now just
several credits away from a sociology degree. She started seeing a therapist, and the two connected.

"That was the beginning of a new me," she wrote for a college essay. "One I can be proud of and
understand in spite of what happened. That what happened to me does not define who I am or will
become. Although he took something from me that night, he could never take away my ability to
overcome."

Loveland doesn't consider herself a religious person, but her feelings toward that night are that
"everything happens for a reason." Why was she raped and not her friend, who Meggett had initially
talked to? She thinks it's because her history with sexual abuse and survivor's constitution better
enabled her to overcome it.

She's determined to make good on the experience. She has started doing stand-up comedy, with a
mostly autobiographical act, lending truth to the old axiom that comedy equals tragedy plus time. She
also was recently certified as a rape crisis counselor. When she was going through her own ordeal, none
of the counselors had been victims themselves. She hopes to connect with other victims more
intimately.

Speaking about that night and its aftermath has been a difficult process for her. The day I first contacted
her, she skipped work, temporarily sinking back into the hole which she originally descended after the
attack. Her sleep has been troubled. Many of our conversations have brought tears, and with them, a
reminder that as far as she has come, her nightmare with Meggett still has the power to overwhelm her,
and might always.

Despite this, she has persisted.

"I've never had a chance to have my story be told," she said. "Neither did the '06, the '08, the '09. We all
deserve to have some acknowledgement."

Prior to the trial for the rape of Stacy Hooper and the burglary of her home, prosecutors filed a motion
to introduce Meggett's prior crimes as evidence. But Circuit Judge Kristi Harrington denied it, saying
prior incidents might prejudice a jury tasked with determining Meggett's guilt or innocence of the crimes
at hand. This is pretty standard: By law, a defendant's "prior bad acts" can't be brought up unless the
defense opens the door with a character defense, as in, "The defendant isn't the type of person who
would commit X crime." This presents something of a tightrope for the defense and is often a reason
why defendants don't take the stand on their own behalf, an option Meggett exercised.

Meanwhile, Meggett's attorney, Beattie Butler, succeeded in prohibiting anyone from informing the jury
that Meggett was a former NFL player, thus reducing the likelihood that jurors would disobey
instructions and search his name on the Internet. According to prosecutors, Butler had an intern delete
Meggett's Wikipedia page.

So during the trial Meggett sat there as an ordinary defendant, and an indigent one at that. This time,
instead of the best attorney money could buy, he was represented by a public defender.
Still, primarily due to sloppy police work, the case seemed to be going his way. The soiled towel was
seized during a warrantless search of his car and ruled inadmissible. Cops somehow lost photos of
Hooper's bruised neck taken the day after the rape.

"Because of his history, this guy's basically a serial rapist."

The jury deliberated for more than four hours. The general rule is that the longer the jury is out, the
better the defendant's odds become. During this time, Simpson and fellow prosecutor, Culver Kidd,
considered a plea deal. But in the end, they decided to take their chances with the jury.

This was no one-time crime. For the first time, authorities had connected all the attacks and realized
what they had. "Because of his history, this guy's basically a serial rapist," said Simpson, who noted that
Meggett's attacks all followed a similar pattern: He targeted young, vulnerable, and compromised white
women. He befriended them — or "groomed" them, in criminal justice parlance — often under a false
name. Finally, he used the same hold while raping them. His pattern of this behavior was known to
stretch back more than a decade, and as his life spun out of control, the behavior was escalating, with
the time between assaults becoming shorter.

"The case was too important, and this guy was just too dangerous. It was an all-or-nothing kind of
thing," Simpson said.

Finally, the jury came back. Meggett was expressionless and untroubled looking when they rendered
their verdict: guilty, of both first-degree criminal sexual conduct and burglary. He had always possessed
a knack for hiding his inner thoughts, and for preventing horrible realities from registering on his psyche
or face.

Sentencing was left to Judge Harrington. She had seen the chronicle of Meggett's prior attacks even
though the jury had not, and she was under no obligation to disregard it. The sentence she imposed —
30 years, of which Meggett has to serve 85 percent — was the longest possible. Simpson said that
without the prior offenses, a ballpark estimate of a sentence would have been 15 to 20 years.

"We knew she wouldn't accept [the catalogue of priors], but that wasn't by accident," Simpson told me.
"We wanted to put that in her mind. You can't unring the bell."

Loveland attended the trial, even though she wasn't called to testify. Because her case was never
brought up, she was not aware that her encounter with Meggett might have factored into the judge's
sentence. When I told her Simpson's opinion that the prior incidents had a huge impact, her eyes welled
up. But these were tears of gratitude and catharsis and not those of recounted horror.

Nov. 10, 2013 marked the three-year anniversary of Meggett's sentence. It's bittersweet for Loveland:
As with everything related to that night, the date stirs up a conflicting blend of emotions. But just as it
reminds her of still-open wounds, it also points to closure.

"Three years ago, his prison door was locked, and mine was just opening," she said. "I'm not saying I've
walked through it all the way. But I know it's open."

Tony Agnone, Meggett's longtime agent, has a difficult time imagining someone he knew as "a great
guy, great person" committing the crimes that put him behind bars.
"Whenever you have a public defender, in a situation like that, and whenever you have that many
people clawing at you to get a piece of it, it eventually drains you down," he began.

But he then added, "I'm sure everybody you'd ask would have that ‘shocked neighbor' reaction."

Lewis Tillman, Meggett's former backfield mate and friend with the Giants, said, "I have nothing to say
on that subject."

Mark Collins, the cornerback, said, "I'm of the mindset that we're teammates and we're bonded for life,
so it really saddens me. You never knew he had that kind of perversion inside of him."

Bart Oates, a Giants center in those years, said, "How'd he think he could get away with something like
that?"

Ultimately, the motivations for Meggett’s behavior are anybody’s guess. A deeply buried trauma in his
childhood? A personality disorder? Athlete entitlement? The learned aggressiveness as a means of
problem solving that accompanies being a football player? Traumatic brain injury caused by football? A
combination of factors impossible to parse?

It is hard to reconcile the player with the man behind bars, and Collins reaches to understand. "One
thing I noticed, he had a dent in his forehead, right in the middle. It looked like he had a mini-lobotomy."

While it may never be possible to determine with absolute certainty whether each incident went down
precisely as his accusers allege, the end result is irrefutable: David Meggett is incarcerated, convicted of
first-degree criminal sexual conduct and burglary.

Whatever the cause, David Meggett will almost certainly be in prison for at least the next 20 years, and
probably 25, since parole in South Carolina is exceedingly rare. By then he will be 72 years old. He has
already lost his appeal. Currently, he is applying for post-conviction relief (PCR) on the grounds of
incompetent counsel, a last-gasp, Hail Mary attempt attorneys say is de rigueur for people with serious
sentences.

Christopher Murphy, the state-appointed attorney who will represent Meggett during the hearing in the
next several months, said, "It's almost impossible to prevail on PCR applications."

Meggett's home today is a 6-by-8-foot cell in Lieber Correctional Institution, which he shares with
another inmate. The maximum security prison, 30 minutes up the road from North Charleston, is
generally thought of as the roughest in the state, and contains South Carolina's death row. Most of the
inmates are serving long sentences. There's a saying among them that goes, "Once they send you to
Lieber, they can't send you anywhere else." Because South Carolina has one of the lowest cost-per-
inmate figures in the country, Lieber offers no formal counseling or rehabilitation programs for those
convicted of rape.

Still, Meggett's situation in Lieber is better than most. Warden Joseph McFadden told me that his
behavioral record is spotless and has earned him a coveted place in what is known as the "honors
dorm," where cell doors are kept unlocked most of the time, allowing inmates to meander around the
wing and hang out in the common area, which has a television. More importantly, probably, is that
Meggett keeps company with fellow well-behaved inmates, which makes life more pleasant and reduces
his own chances of a behavioral infraction.
Meggett is better educated than most inmates and works from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. as an
administrative clerk in the cafeteria. It might not seem like much to anyone on the outside, but it beats
retreading tires or disassembling worn-out transmissions, two Lieber industries that employ many
prisoners.

There are no organized sports at Lieber, and no conjugal visits. Meggett gets around two visits per
month, McFadden said, and although he wasn't authorized to tell me who comes to see him, Meggett's
brother James told me he receives regular visits from a "lady friend." During the visits, the couple can
only hold hands.

"He's kinda settled, fairly quiet, doesn't make any hard moves or use his name to get any benefits," said
McFadden. "If you didn't know his history, you wouldn't think he was anything but a nice guy."

~ NOTE ON SOURCES ~

During the reporting of this story the author conducted interviews with sexual assault victims, law
enforcement, prison and judicial officials, members of David Meggett’s family, friends and teammates,
and made extensive use of police and court documents. Although no names have been changed, some
victims and acquaintances of Meggett have chosen to remain anonymous. All victims identified by name
in this story have either previously been identified in the press or have chosen to be identified by name.
Some composite scenes have been recreated using witness statements, police reports, affidavits and
interviews. All direct quotations are either from an interview, previously published reports or witness
statements, police reports or affidavits.

Per standard South Carolina Department of Corrections policy, David Meggett was unavailable for an
interview for this article.

The author would like to thank Prosecutors Chad Simpson and Culver Kidd of the Ninth Circuit Judicial
Circuit of South Carolina, David, Nikki and Elise Schnell, and the anonymous victims and former
girlfriends of David Meggett for their assistance and cooperation.

Special thanks to Jeanine Loveland.