NYCFC intern details alleged sexual harassment by David Villa: I just feel small

Publish date: 2024-04-12

Editor’s Note: This story was included in The Athletic’s Best of 2020. View the full list.

Skyler Badillo sat on the kitchen floor in July, phone in hand. She’d already been parked there for an hour, scrolling through her Twitter mentions, a collection of messages that seemed to grow uglier by the second.

Down the list she went, casting her better judgement aside and reading every tweet, one after another. Some of them were laced with the same type of demeaning vitriol hurled at women on the Internet on any given day. But others felt different. They felt threatening.

Badillo could not unglue herself from her phone. In tears, she absorbed every message, a multi-lingual collection of threats and insults interspersed with occasional messages of support. The ones in Spanish, some of which she struggled to understand, she translated. In general terms, they seemed to relay one message above all: Nobody believes you. You’re a liar.

Badillo, with her 200 or so Twitter followers, was not accustomed to having anything she tweeted resonate on that grand of a scale. Her Twitter account served mostly as a repository for her thoughts about school, or basketball, or politics, a venue to fire thoughts off into the void. But now Badillo, a former intern on the training staff of Major League Soccer’s New York City FC, had leveled a sexual harassment accusation against one of global soccer’s highest-profile players.

“I thought I was getting the opportunity of a lifetime when I got that internship,” Badillo wrote in her tweet. “What I got was David Villa touching me every fucking day and my bosses thinking it was great comedic material.”

Villa responded a day later to Badillo’s post, saying in a statement that her accusations were “entirely false.” In a statement to ESPN’s Jeff Carlisle on Nov. 7th, NYCFC announced that an investigation into misconduct at the club found that “a small number of players and staff did not act in accordance with the club’s standards in their interactions with the intern and with other club staff.”

“This behavior included unnecessary physical contact, teasing, and comments regarding clothing and appearance,” the statement continued. “The club found that this behavior was inappropriate and unacceptable.”

NYCFC did not name Villa or any others in its statement. The club also said in its release that it’s in the process of implementing “a series of changes within the organization aimed at ensuring that such behavior does not occur in the future.”

The statement did little to comfort Badillo, who says she suffered through two seasons of harassment at the club. There was Villa, whose alleged advances were so frequent that they became a running joke in the training room, and there were her supervisors, who she says enabled his behavior. And there was the organization itself — Badillo says she didn’t even know who to turn to when her workplace became a hostile one.

“Women brave enough to tell their stories this loudly are my heroes,” Badillo said in July, referencing other women in sports who’d come forward recently.

“Someday.”

Badillo joined NYCFC in May of 2018 as a 20-year-old intern with the first team training staff, an assignment designed to fulfill the last of her athletic training degree requirements at Long Island University-Brooklyn. On the surface it seemed like an ideal fit — a chance to work for one of MLS’s highest-profile clubs, one which featured a diverse, well-regarded roster and a coaching staff with a European pedigree.

And then there was David Villa, the club’s marquee player. A World Cup-winner, Villa was and still is the most prolific scorer in the history of the Spanish national team. He was also NYCFC’s first-ever signing and widely seen — publicly, at least — as a model teammate; an example of a European megastar who afforded MLS the same level of respect as La Liga, or any other top league.

Badillo was tasked with working alongside NYCFC’s training staff — Kevin Christen, now 38, its lead trainer, and Melvyn Pamplona, now, 34, NYCFC’s assistant trainer who also oversaw the interns. On any given day, Badillo would have contact with a host of first-team players, helping them through rehabilitation or training routines and aiding the training staff with equipment during games.

As a woman in a predominantly male environment, Badillo says: “I knew to expect a decent amount of weird comments or off-hand jokes. And that stuff really never bothered me. I have brothers, I’ve been around men’s sports for a long time, that stuff wasn’t a problem.”

Badillo, though, says she realized fairly quickly that the comments she’d be subjected to at NYCFC would extend well beyond what most would consider appropriate workplace banter.

When she failed to adequately clean training tape from a player’s leg one day in June, Badillo says that Christen told her he expected her to be “better at cleaning,” because she was a “female.” Badillo ignored the comment and busied herself by folding a pile of towels elsewhere in the training room, which led to another alleged joke from Christen: “Am I interrupting your laundry?”

Around the same time, Badillo says two other training interns at NYCFC’s training facility in Orangeburg, NY, informed her she’d been the subject of an ongoing wager between Christen and Pamplona, her supervisors.

“They told me that there was some sort of bet going on between the head athletic trainer Kevin and our boss, who is in charge of the interns, Melvyn, about which of the two of them was going to sleep with me,” Badillo says. “I just remember being like — ‘I’m not sure why you’re telling me this?’ But then it sort of clicked. You know, when you find out information, you think about all the stuff that happened before that. Like, ‘oh, that wasn’t a nice comment, that was actually a joke that I was unaware of.’”

Via a club spokesperson, Pamplona declined an interview request. Christen did not respond to multiple text messages and calls requesting an interview.

Badillo says that the vast majority of NYCFC’s players were respectful of her and the other women working for the club. Villa, according to Badillo, was different. In mid-June, in the training room, Badillo says she reached for an item next to Villa, at which point he grabbed her hand, stroking it while looking directly at her. Two days later, he became even more direct.

“He started telling me that he loved me that week,” says Badillo. “That would end up being a constant. He would say it to other people, that he loved me. If I was walking out of the room, he’d yell it. If Melvyn was standing there he’d tell Melvyn that he loved me.”

Badillo remembers seeing Villa’s young son at training one day. She felt relieved because she assumed his advances would be tempered by the presence of his child.

“His kid was sitting on his lap,” recalls Badillo, “and he told me he loved me. It was like — ‘OK, there goes that theory.’”

Days later, Badillo was in the training room with Pamplona and Christen, and Villa, the last player remaining at practice. Ahead of a rare weekend off, Villa asked her what her plans were for the weekend. Badillo, who by then had begun making an effort to keep her interactions with the striker as brief as possible, simply told him that she’d planned to be in the city.

“I was just cutting tape, getting tape ready for the Monday morning training, because there wasn’t a lot to do,” remembers Badillo. “I was standing there and my back was to David. He got up and walked up behind me and put his hands on my hips and sort of pressed me into the counter I was standing at and whispered, into my ear, that I should ‘be careful of men in the city.’ And then he just left … I looked at Kevin and Kevin was looking at me. He’d seen the entire thing.”

On another occasion, Villa approached Badillo in the presence of Christen and Pamplona and asked her if she “likes to party.”

“It was like ‘no, I don’t,’ I never have been a real partier,” Badillo says. “He started asking me what kind of alcohol I drink, which… I was 20 years old at the time. I was like ‘I don’t really drink.’ He was asking ‘well, what kind of alcohol should I buy’ so that I would come to his apartment for a party. I looked at Melvyn and said ‘I don’t think this is a good conversation to be having,’ sort of hoping that he would help me out. And his response was just (to say) ‘well it was just a question.’”

Villa declined to be interviewed for this piece. A spokesperson for the player provided the following statement:

“While David has never faced this type of issue before, he appreciates the seriousness of this matter and believes it is important to encourage people to speak out about their concerns. When David first learned of this situation two years after he had already left the team, he fully cooperated with the investigation and as he has said from the beginning — any allegations of inappropriate behavior are untrue.”

Pamplona and Christen had a running joke that Badillo would someday file a lawsuit against Villa for workplace harassment, she says.

“Kevin told me that when I sue David, he would be my key witness,” remembers Badillo. “At one point during a game day, all of the players were in their pregame meeting and of course the topic of David came up because it was everybody’s favorite thing to talk about. Kevin (jokingly) said that for an extra cut of the money I get from David he would lie and say that he saw David pull me into a locker room at one point.” (A player present at the meeting confirmed Badillo’s account.)

Villa’s advances remained consistent and persistent. If Villa passed her in a hallway, Badillo says he would frequently wink, or make what she describes as a “kissy face” or a loud kissing noise. If he approached her to say good morning while she was sitting on a training table, Villa would sometimes place his hand on her inner thigh. If she sat with her legs open at all, Villa would sometimes approach her and attempt to stand in between them. If she didn’t acknowledge him, she’d get a “playful” kick in the foot. “Why do you look at me like you hate me?” Badillo remembers him asking from time to time.

Badillo says she worked through all of this while simultaneously being obligated to have her own, professional physical contact with Villa — treating his calves or his shins, for example, or his hip flexors and his groin. “That is not super fun,” Badillo says, “when somebody is sexually harassing you.”

In screenshots of text messages sent by Badillo to friends and coworkers over the course of 2018 and 2019 and reviewed by The Athletic, Badillo repeatedly expresses concern about the Spaniard’s advances.

By that point, in mid-2018, Badillo had carved out a few places at the training facility where she could seek refuge. She’d duck away between racks of game-ready kits, or stow away in the boot room. She says she’d often time her arrival and departure from work in order to minimize contact with Villa, Christen and Pamplona. She even began to alter her appearance at times so as to not catch Villa’s eye. If she wore her hair down, for example, she knew he would view it as a green light. In a text message to a friend one day, she writes how after a couple of hours with her hair down she put it back up.

“Because anytime I did anything remotely different,” says Badillo, “he would just be like ‘oh, you have a date? Who are you seeing? What are your special plans — your night plans.’”

She remembers once offering Villa instructions on how to take the subway home, only to have the player respond: “Now you know where I live. You should come be my nanny, that way you’ll already be in my house.”

Badillo says the incident occurred in a busy post-practice training room and in front of Pamplona and others “and nobody says anything.”

Late in the 2018 season, it was common knowledge within that club that Villa would be leaving for Japan at the end of the season to finish his career overseas. It was a much-needed glimmer of hope for Badillo. In early October, she found herself seated on a countertop in the training center when Villa entered.

“David came up to me and sat next to me,” says Badillo, “but so close that our thighs were touching. And so I, being so close, thought ‘how do I minimize this without making this a thing.’ I scooted over a couple of inches, and then he scooted over so our legs were almost touching. At that point I gave up and was like ‘I’m just going to give up, i’ll just let it go.’ He was just watching videos on his phone, asking me if I liked dancing.”

Eventually, one of the other interns approached and touched Villa’s arm to get his attention. Villa responded “don’t touch me,” shooing the intern away.

“And I was like ‘hey, how bout we don’t touch me either, then?’” says Badillo. “And then he turned to me and told me that he’d never touched me.”

Badillo retreated to a storage closet to compose herself. Moments later, she received a text message from another staff member, a photo of her and Villa seated on the countertop just moments earlier with a drawing of a heart superimposed around the two.

Badillo showed her supervisor, Melvyn Pamplona, the image. Pamplona, as Badillo remembers it, burst out laughing. Later, as the two sat and ate lunch together, Pamplona told Badillo to get her phone back out, insisting that she show others at the table the image. By the time it made it back to Christen, the head trainer, it was accompanied by a caption: “new office romance.”

Badillo’s texts to a friend that day offer a window into her emotional state. In them, she mentions that former NYCFC head coach Patrick Vieira — who Badillo worked for briefly in 2018 before his departure — used to ask her whether his players were treating her well. That environment had disappeared.

“I curse men on the street out all the time,” Badillo texted a friend in regards to Villa. “But with him I just freeze and feel small.”

After the incident on the training table and Badillo’s visible discomfort with it, Kevin Christen asked to speak with Badillo when she arrived at work two days later. They met privately in Christen’s office with no HR representative present.

“(Our meeting) basically went to the tune of ‘hey, all this terrible stuff has happened and there’s not really a lot we can do about it, so how bout you don’t sit on the side of the counter where you usually do,’” Badillo says. “Kevin wanted me to stay over by him, so that maybe David would come find me less, and I also wasn’t supposed to treat David anymore — I really liked that idea.”

“He also said something along the lines of ‘if it was anybody else, we could maybe do something,’” remembers Badillo.

Badillo’s respite from Villa’s advances did not last long. Within days, he again approached her from behind and grabbed her by her sides. Badillo had been told by Christen that Villa would be talked to, but “if (Villa) was he obviously didn’t care,” she says. Within two weeks, Pamplona told Badillo to treat Villa, ending the policy that had been put in place.

Badillo knew that if she leveled a charge against Villa, she’d be accusing the face of the franchise and a global soccer superstar. What’s more, Badillo notes, the authority figures that surrounded her — Pamplona and Christen — were already aware of Villa’s behavior and, as she tells it, making light of it.

Publicly, Villa was still viewed as a model teammate, but by 2018 some of those teammates had had enough of him. Several of them, who spoke anonymously to The Athletic, said Villa had often isolated himself from the bulk of the locker room and frequently, those players said, he failed to treat the club’s staff and lower-profile players with a base level of respect.

“David is going to get away with anything,” one player wrote Badillo in a text message reviewed by The Athletic, sent just days after the training table incident. The player goes on to suggest that she should just smack Villa the next time she is harassed by him.

“I mean you’re getting harassed and everyone’s seeing it but not saying anything,” he wrote. “They can’t be mad when you react.”

(Brad Penner / USA TODAY Sports)

Villa departed NYCFC after the club crashed out of the playoffs against Atlanta United in late October 2018. At that point, Badillo says, she’d grown so exhausted of her workplace that she was not disappointed the club was eliminated. It meant that Villa would be gone sooner.

Badillo continued to work toward the hours she needed to complete the practical requirements for her degree with NYCFC in 2019, but even though Villa was gone his advances towards her remained a running joke in the office. Then, in August, before a Thursday night game against the Houston Dynamo at Yankee Stadium, she entered the press box to grab her pregame meal and a pair of soft-serve ice cream cones for Pamplona and Christen — “typical intern grunt work,” she says.

As she approached the ice cream machine, Badillo says an older man approached her from behind, put his hand on her lower back, and said: “How come it’s always the gorgeous girls with perfect bodies who are eating ice cream?” She tried to get away from him, “but the ice cream machine itself was in a corner, and he sort of had me pinned, and it was just very awkward and uncomfortable.”

When she retreated back to the stadium’s lower level with Pamplona and Christen’s ice cream, she told them: “I wish it was worth it, I got groped by an old man while I was trying to get your ice cream.” The two laughed and asked if she was serious. “Oh, yeah,” Badillo responded. “Old man touched my back and wouldn’t let me leave the counter while I was trying to get the ice cream.” Pamplona and Christen laughed again. “And then they brought up David again, and I left the room to go cry,” Badillo says.

Badillo later returned to the locker room to help with pregame treatments. At one point, an older male X-Ray technician walked into the room. According to Badillo, Pamplona bellowed: “Hey Skyler, maybe this is the old guy who groped you!”

After the match started, Badillo filed a report with stadium security. At Yankee Stadium, that is the NYPD. The Athletic obtained a copy of Badillo’s police report, which lists the details of the alleged incident and matches her present-day account.

Badillo did not want the older man arrested; she says she simply wanted him spoken to, and his credential possibly revoked. Yet Badillo says that the NYPD officials she spoke with refused to allow her to view the security footage from the press box, something that may have helped her identify the man who had put his hands on her.

The following day, Pamplona offered an apology to Badillo via text message. “I did not mean to blow you off or demean you with my comments,” he wrote. Badillo took two weeks off following the incident — time which she’d already planned on taking — and returned, committed to seeing the rest of her stay at NYCFC out.

She returned to find that her shifts had been cut down and says that Pamplona frequently declined to talk to her, using the staff’s other training interns as go-betweens. “It just became ‘I guess I’ll get through the day with as few words spoken to me as possible,’” says Badillo.

On her last day, late October 2019, Badillo was working through a complex mix of emotions — sadness, relief, excitement. Pamplona noticed her in tears.

“If it was so bad,” Badillo remembers him saying, “if you weren’t sad to leave, then you wouldn’t be crying.”

(Grant Hindsley for The Athletic)

For months after her time at NYCFC ended, Badillo stayed relatively quiet. She graduated, got a masters’ degree and put herself in a holding pattern. After her experience at NYCFC, she wasn’t entirely sure whether her chosen career path was still the correct one. Badillo says she has friends who work as trainers at other teams across pro sports and have had good experiences, but she has her doubts.

She dealt with the anxiety and anger caused by her interactions with Villa by telling friends and family about them, as she’d done all along, and occasionally she’d take her experience public on Twitter. When Villa retired in January 2020, she posted a story about Villa’s recent cup victory in Japan, one with the headline “David Villa bows out with one last trophy.”

“It’s the first of the year,” Badillo wrote, “and I can get no peace.”

Her feelings bubbled to the surface again when Villa emerged as an investor in Queensboro FC, a USL expansion franchise set to take the field in Queens in 2021. Occasionally, she’d snap back at Queensboro’s official Twitter account. Nobody seemed to notice. When the Washington Post ran a story on alleged harassment at the NFL’s Washington Football Team, Badillo felt inspired to speak out more directly.

“I saw a lot of people tweeting about how this isn’t a Washington Football Team problem,” says Badillo. “(They were saying that) this is a whole NFL problem, that this happens at every team. And I was just like — this isn’t just the NFL, this isn’t just American football. This is everywhere.”

Badillo took her thoughts to Twitter, then she posted a screengrab of one of those tweets to her Instagram, where many of NYCFC’s current and former players still followed her. One of those players reached out, encouraging her to speak out and offering his support. The next day, a Sunday morning, Badillo awoke to find that her tweets about her experiences with Villa had gone viral. Her phone lit up. One of NYCFC’s players — at the time in the “bubble” in Orlando, participating in the MLS is Back tournament, also reached out. “Everyone down here has seen it,” he wrote. Within hours, Badillo received three calls from NYCFC’s legal counsel, she says.

DMs flowed in, too, from journalists asking to write her story and from fans offering support. Still, the bulk of the contact Badillo received in the days following her accusations against Villa was negative. Villa is widely-admired in Spain, a giant of the game who led the nation to its first and only World Cup final victory.

“You’re around these people all day, every day. You sort of forget how famous they are, because it’s just like ‘oh, here’s that annoying dude I work with every day who is going to make me miserable,’” says Badillo. “So I keep having to remind myself of, like, he is very famous, and people will say shit like this on his behalf, because he kicks a ball.”

Some critics wondered if she had just misinterpreted a cultural difference.

“I’ve been to Spain, I’ve been to a lot of other countries. I’m Puerto Rican. They kiss on the cheek, they hug. That’s not the same thing,” Badillo says. “I had athletes who kissed me on the cheek every morning because they asked if that was OK. And that was fine. The insinuation that I just don’t understand cultural barriers is weird, because I think my first year there we had athletes from 14 different countries. I don’t know how and why it would only be one athlete I had an issue with.”

Many others accused Badillo of seeking money, or fame. Badillo says she’s been offered a settlement — a financial offer from City Football Group that was accompanied by a “non-disparagement agreement.” To Badillo, that stipulation was a non-starter. NYCFC declined to comment on any ongoing settlement talks.

“Part of it is just that I don’t want their money,” she says. “And part of it is that I don’t think anything changes when people bite their tongue.”

In its statement to ESPN, NYCFC said the club has begun to implement a series of changes — “enhancing reporting processes for victims of misconduct; instituting enhanced education and awareness training on harassment and workplace conduct for all staff, including interns; improving the onboarding and training process for interns; and instituting clear protocols for investigating workplace misconduct.”

When pressed for specifics this week, a club spokesperson offered a list of current and future changes to their procedures. Those include performing sexual harassment training twice a year (which is to include individuals brought on via third party staffing agencies). The club says it will also enhance its existing reporting processes for victims of misconduct and provide clearer pathways for reporting incidents. In regards to the intern program as a whole, the club says it’s committed to reviewing and revising the process in which interns are recruited, hired, supervised and managed.

Badillo points out that while the club did hire an external law firm to aid with its investigation, it was not a fully independent investigation. “I wanted an independent investigation because obviously, the people who still work there, I don’t know how truthful they’re going to be,” she says. She took note that the club’s statement referenced a “small number of players” but didn’t name Villa.

“That puts a lot of people into doubt who I don’t think deserve that,” she says. “It does bother me that they wouldn’t name him. For (players) who I consider to be really good people to be sort of doubted now as possibly having been really inappropriate I think is really unfair.”

There was also the club’s use of the word “teasing” to describe what occurred.

“In all sports environments there is teasing. I was teased occasionally for an ugly nail polish color, and when my new shoes made my feet look really big. That’s teasing — I’m not sure how my bosses joking behind my back about who might sleep with me, or laughing in my face when I attempted to tell them about being touched in the press box is even remotely the same,” she wrote in an email.

Kevin Christen left the club in early 2020, months before Badillo went public with her accusations against Villa. But Melvyn Pamplona still works at NYCFC. In its statement, the club said that it had “taken corrective action with respect to the one employee that remains” with the organization. The club declined to name the employee or elaborate specifically on what action was taken. They also declined to elaborate on what measures, specifically, were taken (if any) in regards to Pamplona.

Badillo would love to think that telling her story publicly will put an end to the anxiety and emotional turmoil that her experiences at NYCFC caused. But she knows better.

“It was a miserable two years there, and a miserable few months now spent talking about it,” she says. “I don’t expect it to get better when this is published. There’s not a ton to gain here for me, but I think a lot about how lonely it was to be in that position while I was there. Every time a new story came out about a celebrity being accused of sexual harassment, I hoped like hell it would be (David Villa) next. Not that I wanted him to have done these things to anyone else, but because knowing I wasn’t alone would have helped me so much.

“So if me sticking my neck out and telling my story helps one other person who was harassed by him, or at the club — or anywhere — feel even the slightest bit less alone, then it will have been worth it.”

(Top photo: Grant Hindsley for The Athletic)

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NYCFC intern details alleged sexual harassment by David Villa: I just feel small