A video from August 2016, in which a minor league baseball player Danry Vasquez filmed beating his now-ex-girlfriend named Fabiana Pérez in the stairwell of a Corpus Christi, Texas, made headlines on March 14 when it went viral.
The violent incident caught on a surveillance camera which generated outrage on social media, the incident also led Vasquez out from Lancaster Barnstormers of the independent Atlantic League of Professional Baseball. In addition, Vasquez was signed for the game even though the baseball player’s arrest for the beating his then-girlfriend had been public.
The woman in the violent video, Pérez came forward to cleared the air, she appeared on Univision’s news show Aquí y Ahora where she shared the domestic violence experience she faced while dating Vasquez, who is now a husband of another woman.
Pérez reveals that she first met Vasquez when she was only 14-year-old, teen Pérez dreamed to marry him one day as she believed that he was the love of her life. She told hosts of the talk show, “We met through social media. For me he was my only love. I said to myself: ‘I will never fall in love again.’”
The Venezuelan athlete was reportedly signed to the Detroit Tigers for the sum of $1.2 million at the age of 16, and the couple came in a live-in relationship after Pérez graduated high school. Pérez shared Vasquez started to grow more possessive and jealous, and she started distancing herself from her family in order to please her boyfriend. She said, “I thought that over-protection was love.”
A Houston Astros farm team, the Corpus Christi Hooks later signed Vasquez in 2016, where his violent assault on his girlfriend was caught on camera. Pérez said that he saw her talking to a male pal at the stadium and got so upset that he escorted her the stairwell where he mercilessly beat her and thought no one was watching him.
The 21-year-old Pérez said, “I couldn’t believe that the person who loved me was mistreating me.” She added, “I was in shock.”
