If a San Diego woman is to be believed, then new Pittsburgh Steelers defensive lineman Cam Thomas brought a little more than his talents to the South Side when he signed with the team during free agency this spring.
According to TMZ Sports, of all reputable places, a woman by the name of Adrienne is suing the former San Diego Chargers nose tackle for incidents stemming from their time together dating back to March 2010.
The headline that TMZ chose to run today, which proliferated the story, focuses on the fact that the woman accuses Thomas of having unprotected sex with her while neglecting to inform her that he has herpes—even lying about it.
Of greater issue, or at least equally significant, offense, which the article notes only at the bottom, is that Thomas is also accused of being “physically abusive”, and that the woman is suing in part over “sexual battery”.
The Popdust article claims that the woman broke off relations with Thomas after discovering that he was unfaithful to her, and that the physical altercations began after she confronted him with this revelation.
The suit charges that Thomas, while on the freeway, said to her that “we all have to die some time” while attempting to push her out of the vehicle. After weeks of profusive apologies, she relented and went back to him, after which “Thomas choked her, set the bed on fire while she was in it, and pinned her down and burned her with her flat iron”.
Prior to these incidents, the accuser claims that she questioned Thomas about physical signs of a possible sexually transmitted disease around his genital area as far back as March 2010, which the defensive lineman dismissed as being caused by sweat buildup from his football equipment.
She says that he claimed in a later incident to have gotten his private parts caught in his zipper when she questioned him about the sores visible on said parts.
The woman says that she was tested for STDs in December 2010, but she did not test positive for more than a year, until February 2012, which is not necessarily unusual for such a delayed occurrence when it comes to STDs.
What may be slightly curious is why the suit is being brought about now, more than two full years after testing positive for STDs, which she claims in her suit she could only have gotten from the Steelers’ starting left defensive end.
Thomas, of course, signed a two-year, $4 million contract with Pittsburgh in March.
Now would certainly be an opportune time to bring about the suit, even assuming that there were no extraneous factors preventing her from filing one prior to now.
Regardless of the timing of the suit, if anything the woman alleges is true, it will certainly be disappointing, even if it might not affect his career in any meaningful way. No doubt the Steelers would have liked to have known of this information before signing him.
