© Kelley L Cox | 2017 Sep 11
A video captured by a bystander Friday morning showed San Francisco Giants CEO Larry Baer involved in a physical altercation with his wife. The video published by TMZ Sports showed Baer standing over his wife, Pam, who is sitting in a chair, as the two parties argued. Baer then appeared to try to grab a phone out of her hand, dragging her to the ground in the process as she screams, ““Oh my God, no, help!”
Evan Sernoffsky, a crime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, spoke with Baer shortly after the incident, and did reporting at the scene in Hayes Valley. This afternoon, he joined Bob Fitzgerald and Rod Brooks on KNBR, and detailed everything he knows about the incident.
“This whole thing started later in the morning around noon,” Sernoffsky said. “I got a call from somebody that they’d heard about this incident, and that there was apparently a video going around. Somebody sent it to TMZ and they also sent it to us. So I headed here over to the scene. I had seen the video — obviously we’ve all seen it at this point — it’s pretty shocking given the people involved. I talked to multiple, multiple witnesses down at the scene.”
The incident took place at an open public plaza at corner of Hayes and Octavia Streets.
“Really the video that we’ve seen of the altercation came really at the end of what everyone said was a long, verbal squabble between this couple. Multiple, multiple witnesses told me they saw Larry getting up, sitting down, going back-and-forth, with the wife saying ‘I’m leaving,’ coming back, she’s saying, ‘no stay here.’ One man who was only feet away said he heard Larry say ‘Let’s go to counseling today,’ over and over again. And then all of the sudden this manifested into this moment that we’ve all seen over and over again now.
“That video obviously shows the disturbing physical altercation of Larry apparently trying to get his cell phone away from his wife. She goes down, she starts screaming, as she’s screaming we sort of lose track of what happened in the video. The people who were there — three gentlemen — ran over, separated the two. The men said they continued to get into sort of a verbal altercation. They eventually kept them separate, and they both walked off in different directions from the scene.”
After being tipped off about the incident, Sernoffsky left a message on Baer’s cell phone, before the Giants CEO called him back.
“He obviously seemed sort of agitated still about the circumstances of what had happened. For obvious reasons he was not happy that we were doing a story. He called me back, he gave me a statement. I asked him some questions. I asked him ‘Are police involved with this now?’ He said, ‘Police are not involved.’ I said, ‘Have you apologized to your wife?’ He said, ‘Yes, the matter is resolved.’
“He didn’t seem to me like he had a lot of time to sort of gather himself and compose himself. He still seemed a little bit heated over everything that was going on.”
Listen to the full interview below.