This is about the controversy surrounding Danny Almonte, LL pitcher from the Dominican Republic. There is dispute over his age. He may be 12. He may be 14. His brother may be 14 or 16. The official word is supposed to come tomorrow. Also, it looks like Danny has not attended school in NYC in the past 18 months.
But here’s the truly disgusting part:
The father, Felipe Almonte is supposed to be 36.
The mother, Sonia Sonia Margarita Rojas Bretón, is supposed to be 28.
So if Danny’s brother Juan is really 16, she may have had sex with his 19-year-old father when she was only eleven.
Read the Sports Illustrated stories here and here.
You can read more on the story on this thread. My thanks to capacitor for pointing out how young Danny’s mother is.
Hmmm, has it occurred to you that if they are lying about their sons’ ages then they could perhaps fib a bit about their own? Have you never known a person in their thirties / forties to shave a few years off for vanity’s sake?
In this case, the father was 19 and the mother was 11. In the states, this could very well be statutory rape …a more unsettling event than “just” pre-teen pregnancy(IANAL).
Of course, this wasn’t the states…this was the DR where the laws (and perhaps the cultural mores) might be different…it’s reasonable to ask (and I don’t know the answer) if this would be considered “molestation” in the DR.
My thought, too. If she shaved off even a couple of years, she could have had the kid at, say, age 14. Young, but probably not unusual for the Dominican Republic.
What a disgrace. Little Danny and his scumbag father AND his scumbag coach have brought shame upon one of the best kids’ organizations there is. They’ve disgraced baseball.
Your hometown should hold a parade for their team. They got robbed in Williamsport.
Does anyone know what the age of consent is in the DR? Or how we could find out? I have heard that they plan to charge the father for falsifying documents, but not for statutory rape. And read this:
But if the DR finds him guilty of falsifying documents, they may have to find the kid another home.
DDG, I don’t understand: Are you simply telling me that 11-year-old girls can get pregnant or what? I already knew that. Surely you don’t find it acceptable.
What was it Lady Astor said? “I refuse to admit I’m more than 52 even if that does make my sons illegitimate”? “I refuse to admit I’m more than 28 even if that does make my husband a child molester” doesn’t quite have the same ring, but it might well be true. I’m with ShibbO on this one: I want to see a birth certificate for Rojas Bretón before I get all upset about the topic of the OP.
There’s so much disinformation floating around you don’t know who to belive anymore. I feel sorry for Danny, the kid, his idiot parents are gonna royaly f*** him up.
No, of course not. I was just surprised that YOU were surprised. I’m such a cynic–you tell me that an 11-year-old got pregnant and my response, unfortunately, is, “So what else is new?”.
Hear hear. This kind of rumor and speculation-based piling-on makes me ill when I see it.
Let me ask you this: if it turns out the parents’ marriage and their production of offspring are all completely legitimate, will you be disappointed?
A quote from C. S. Lewis comes to mind: “Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling . . . a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? . . . You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything–God and our friends and ourselves included–as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”
I don’t think you have to be a Christian to see the danger in a knee-jerk habit of painting one’s enemies as black as possible. Remember how everyone believed the propaganda stories in the Gulf War, that Iraqi soldiers were going into hospitals and killing Kuwaiti babies in their incubators? Please tell me that you guys aren’t the kind of stooges who lap up that kind of story.
