New York Yankees: Brett Gardner wants ardent lady fan restrained legally
By Jeff Kallman
Gina Devasahayam, Ph.D., is a research doctor obsessed with making Brett Gardner hers. Gardner and the Yankees want a judge to make her stay away.
Eddie Waitkus, phone home, from wherever you are. What you probably wished you had done, Brett Gardner wants done. The New York Yankees outfielder has filed a request that a Bronx judge keep a particularly obsessed fan, whom Gardner says calls herself his future wife, away from himself and his family. The Yankees would also like her kept away from Yankee Stadium and all major league ballparks.
As Waitkus had his Ruth Ann Steinhagen, Brett Gardner seems to have his Gina Devasahayam, according to the New York Post. So far, the distinction is that Steinhagen punctuated her unrequited love with a rifle shell that barely missed Waitkus’s heart, while Devasahayam hasn’t punctuated hers with any kind of weapon other than social media tweets. Yet.
Steinhagen became infatuated with Waitkus as a Chicago Cub (being a Chicagoan she could see him every day at Wrigley Field) but obsessed with him after he was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies.
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In due course, of course, she checked into the Phillies’ Chicago hotel under an alias in 1949, left a note for him to see her on an urgent matter, then let him have it when he complied with the request.
Devashayam is obsessed with Gardner to the point where she was ejected from Yankee Stadium during last postseason and filed a court action demanding her restored access to the ballpark “in accordance with MLB fan policy and also in accordance with ‘Significant other’” of Gardner’s, according to the filing cited by NJ.com.
But she claims Gardner’s shown interest beyond player-fan appreciation in her. Among other things, her legal filing claimed the outfielder makes sad faces when she’s not at the Yankees’ home games and has gestured with his body “as though he is having sexual intercourse with me.”
When an NJ.com reporter interviewed her and pointed out that Gardner is a happily married man, Devasahayam replied, “That is not of importance.” Apparently. Upon filing her suit, she tweeted, “I have never seen you angry at me Gardy, I will claim you play the role of my husband, that is my first right, my second right is to allow me inside the Stadium.”