Is Oscar De La Hoya a Rapist? (From 2000 Sports Illustrated article)

The Kitchen Master paid off several girls who accused him of rape. Was he just bad at checking ID? A victim of scandalous lying sluts? In August 1997 De La Hoya got engaged to an 18-year-old woman named Cassie Van Doran and announced proudly, "She's a virgin." Less than two months later, another woman claimed that she was pregnant by De La Hoya, and he immediately admitted responsibility. (She would deliver a boy, Jacob, who has regular contact with De La Hoya.) The engagement to Van Doran curdled, and during the next two years De La Hoya would father another child, his daughter by Moakler; see a supermarket tabloid publish purported legal papers detailing his $2.5 million payout to a woman who claimed she began a sexual relationship with him when she was 15 (De La Hoya's lawyers deny that any payment was made); and fend off a sexual assault claim that the Los Angeles Police Department dismissed due to lack of evidence. "I was no angel, let's put it that way," De La Hoya says. According to Hernandez, however, his relationship with De La Hoya really began to fray when a lawsuit was filed against the boxer in November 1998 by a Santa Barbara woman, Nicole Rao, who claimed that De La Hoya had raped and imprisoned her at his condominium in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, during a high school trip there in June 1996, when she was 15. De La Hoya and his camp claim that Rao's long delay in filing the suit proves her to be a gold digger, and they expect the case to be settled and placed in the thick file labeled, in Arum's words, "the cost of being Oscar." No physical evidence links De La Hoya to the acts alleged by Rao. Yet, for De La Hoya, any court proceeding promises embarrassment. A motion by Rao's lawyers dated May 15 contains a statement by former De La Hoya bodyguard Eric Purvis, who worked for the boxer in 1995 and was later arrested and sentenced to two years in prison for impersonating a police officer. Purvis described an incident in which De La Hoya and a male friend "were trying to take girl's jeans off and she was saying 'no, no.' She seemed scared." Another time, Purvis stated, he was "awakened in the middle of the night by a girl who was yelling 'stop, stop' to De La Hoya, who was attempting to have sex with the girl in the same room which I was sleeping." Purvis also said, "Among De La Hoya, his friends and his brother Joel, these incidents of De La Hoya meeting younger girls at nightclubs and getting them drunk and having sex with them were not kept secret, but were actively made jokes about." Worse, the May 15 motion includes sections of depositions taken from De La Hoya, his brother and the boxer's friend Joey Gonzalez that seem to give differing accounts of what happened in Cabo on the night of June 26, 1996. Oscar's version is that he and Rao and a group of 10 to 20 people left a bar after midnight and went back to party in Oscar's condo, that he had no sexual relations with Rao and that she was escorted by someone else into a guest bedroom, where, he assumed, she passed out from drinking. Joel states that he remembers no such party being held at the condo after midnight. Gonzalez states that there was a party but Rao did not get so drunk that she had to be put in the guest bedroom. https://www.si.com/vault/2000/06/19/283242/he-says-hes-a-gladiator-but-oscar-de-la-hoya-has-yet-to-give-a-definitive-ring-performance-that-proves-he-has-the-heart-of-a-great-champion