Myers Beats Charges

Not to kill anyone’s buzz about the playoffs, but Tom Durso at Shallow Center has a solid take on the case of Philadelphia Phillies’ pitcher Brett Myers. You may recall that Myers was charged a while back with assaulting his wife on a street in Boston. Now comes word that the charges have been dismissed by a judge, at least in part because Myers’ wife doesn’t wish to pursue the matter.

I don’t have a real strong grasp of how the law works, but I have to agree that on a gut level, this doesn’t seem right at all. According to Durso, the original complaint arose from “multiple eyewitnesses frantically calling 911.” The Philadelphia Daily News corroborates this:

Brett Myers, 26, was arrested during a June series against the Red Sox after witnesses reported seeing him punching and slapping his wife and pulling her hair while the couple walked back to their hotel from a bar. When police arrived, Kim Myers was sitting on the sidewalk with a swollen face, crying, according to the police report.

If that is the case, then this quote from Mrs. Myers following the judge’s decision is particularly chilling:

There’s no violence in our family. That night in Boston we had both been drinking. I was not harmed that night. I was not injured.

Yikes. Denial ain’t a river in Egypt, eh?

And it’s hard to disagree with Durso’s final judgment “that a pro athlete — indeed, that the American celebrity, in general — operates on a different plane, one where accountability is assessed on a far more sliding scale than it is for the rest of us.”

That’s as many sobering realities as I can take in one sitting. Here’s hoping all ends well for the Myerses and the citizens of Boston.