Boxing legend, Oscar De La Hoya sued over alleged sexual assaults in 2020

Boxing legend, Oscar de La Hoya has been accused of sexual assault in a new civil lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles. 

A tequila company executive accused De La Hoya of sexually assaulting her during a trip to the Casa Mexico Tequila distillery in Mexico in March 2020, and then again when they returned to Los Angeles.

The lawsuit, filed in the Los Angeles Superior Court, claims the woman then ‘pushed him from the bed and walked him to his room, opened his door, and immediately returned to her own room’.

The tequila company executive said the next morning, after noticing that De La Hoya was missing from a group that was supposed to tour the distillery, she went to his room to wake him up.

There, the woman, who remains anonymous, claimed De La Hoya ‘pulled [her] into his bed, where he sexually assaulted her’.

Then after the group returned to Los Angeles, a group of executives including De La Hoya, who is a partner of Casa Mexico Tequila, went to dinner at a restaurant before returning to the former boxer’s house.    

‘At some point, when De La Hoya was alone with [the woman], he revealed and retrieved a sexual object from a stored collection in his house. Without [her] consent, De La Hoya forcibly inserted the sexual object into [her] body,’ the lawsuit said according to the LA Times.

The woman, who was relatively new at the company, said she told Casa Mexico founder Don Buccio about the second alleged sexual assault but the company did nothing. 

The Tequila company executive said in the lawsuit she suffered sexual harassment, gender discrimination, retaliation and wrongful termination whilst working at the company.

‘[She] has been severely impacted and has filed a lawsuit to hold [De La Hoya] accountable and those perpetuating toxic masculinity and a hostile work environment where her abuse was not just tolerated, but encouraged and condoned by Casa Mexico’s executives, Michael Gooch and Robert Crossan,’ the alleged victim’s lawyer, Sylvia Torres-Guillén, told the Times.   

‘As a survivor of this abuse, she wants others to know this behavior is unacceptable — and it doesn’t matter who you are. We will seek justice on her behalf.’

De La Hoya has denied the allegations and said: ‘With the 24-hour news cycle we all find ourselves in, more often than not, malicious and unjust accusations are interpreted as truth without the evidence to support their erroneous claims.

‘I am confident my legal team will resolve this matter and prove my innocence.

Last year, De La Hoya claimed he was raped when he was 13 by a woman in her 30s, while at a boxing competition in Hawaii.

‘I was raped at 13, from a woman, an older woman,’ he told the Los Angeles Times. ‘Thirteen, lost my virginity over being, you know, being raped, basically.

‘I was in Hawaii, I think, at some tournament. She was over 35.’

‘You suppress everything,’ he said.

‘You’re living this life, the Golden Boy, but, oh s***, wait, that’s still there.

‘Like I never, like, thought about it, I never processed it, I never really thought how my feelings are … until one day it just comes out, and you don’t know how to deal with it.’

In 1998, when De La Hoya was 25, he was accused of having raped a 15-year-old in June 1996, at a Mexico hotel. The case was settled out of court in 2001.

In 2019 he was accused of inviting a woman, a registered nurse, to his Pasadena, California home in November 2017 and sexually assaulting her.