Browsing: Exwife

Oct 28, 2025, 10:17 PM ET

SANTA ANA, Calif. — The ex-wife of a Los Angeles Angels employee on Tuesday said the MLB team failed her drug-addicted husband during a trial over the fatal overdose of one of its star pitchers.

Camela Kay testified that she previously had seen Angels players partying, drinking and passing around pills on the team plane when she traveled with her then-husband Eric Kay, the team’s communications director. In 2019, after her husband was hospitalized for a drug overdose, she said she heard that he had pills intended for pitcher Tyler Skaggs, and shared the information with the team’s traveling secretary.

Less than three months later, Skaggs was dead.

Eric Kay was later sentenced to 22 years in prison for providing a fentanyl-laced pill that led to the fatal overdose.

“I am sitting in a courtroom for two days in front of a mother who lost her son and a widow,” she said, adding that the father of her three children is in prison. “The Angels failed Eric.”

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Camela Kay testified during the civil trial for a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by Skaggs’ family contending the Angels should be held responsible for letting Eric Kay keep his job while he was addicted to and dealing drugs. The Angels have said team officials did not know Skaggs was taking drugs and that any drug use involving him and Eric Kay happened on their own time and in the privacy of the player’s hotel room.

Attorneys for the family and the Angels have both said Camela Kay’s testimony about the pills is at the heart of the lawsuit.

More than six years ago, Skaggs, then 27, was found dead in a suburban Dallas hotel room before a series against the Texas Rangers. A coroner’s report said Skaggs choked to death on his vomit and a toxic mix of alcohol, fentanyl and oxycodone was found in his system.

During Eric Kay’s federal criminal trial in Texas, five MLB players testified they received oxycodone from him at various times from 2017 to 2019, the years he was accused of obtaining pills and giving them to Angels players.

Medical records for Kay’s 2019 hospitalization indicated he had been battling addiction for a dozen years and had been known to use Norco, oxycodone, antidepressants and marijuana.

Camela Kay said she and other family members had an intervention with Eric Kay in 2017 over drugs. The next day, she said, two Angels officials came over to speak with him and one pulled plastic baggies containing white pills from the bedroom, which fueled her concerns that he was also selling drugs.

In 2019, Eric Kay was driven home by an Angels employee after he was found shirtless and dancing in his office at the stadium, she said. She said she found blue pills among his belongings and he was hospitalized three days for an overdose before going to rehab. She said her sister-in-law told her after visiting him in the hospital that he had told her the pills were for Skaggs.

She said she later found text messages on his phone about him getting his “candy” at the stadium and relayed the information to his supervisor at the Angels. She said she also saw messages from Skaggs asking about “candy” and Eric Kay told her while he was in rehab that he had asked his boss to “keep Tyler off his back.”

Camela Kay said she was concerned her husband was heading back to work so quickly after a six-week stint in rehab, taking on more responsibilities and traveling to Texas with the team.

Angels attorney Todd Theodora asked how Kay could know what was going on with her husband’s drug use since she was sleeping in a separate bedroom and keeping her distance from him since 2017. He also pointed out the report about pills headed toward Skaggs came up when Eric Kay was acting erratically and blurting out words during his overdose.

Camela Kay told jurors she flew on the team plane most recently between 2013 and 2016. Kay said her husband told her the pills she saw players passing around there were Percocet and Xanax.

After Skaggs’ death, Camela Kay filed for divorce, court records show.

Skaggs had been a regular in the Angels’ starting rotation since late 2016 and struggled with injuries repeatedly. He previously played for the Arizona Diamondbacks.

His family is seeking $118 million in lost earnings, compensation for pain and suffering and punitive damages against the team.

After Skaggs’ death, the MLB reached a deal with the players’ association to start testing for opioids and to refer those who test positive to the treatment board.

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  Michael RothsteinOct 27, 2025, 05:26 PM ET

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  Michael Rothstein, based in Atlanta, is a reporter on ESPN’s investigative and enterprise team. You can follow him via Twitter @MikeRothstein.

SANTA ANA, Calif. — The ex-wife of former Los Angeles Angels communications employee Eric Kay testified Monday that the organization was aware of his drug abuse multiple times before Kay supplied the drugs that killed Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs in 2019.

Camela Kay testified in the wrongful death civil trial that she witnessed team employees and players distributing nonprescription drugs to each other, including once on a team plane where she described opioid pills being handed out. Her testimony was repeatedly interrupted with objections by team attorneys.

Camela Kay’s testimony contradicted that of the first two witnesses of the trial — Eric Kay’s ex-boss Tim Mead, the former director of communications, and Angels traveling secretary Tom Taylor. Mead and Taylor both testified they were not aware of Kay’s drug use and whether he was providing drugs to players until after Skaggs’ accidental overdose death in a Texas hotel room in 2019.

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Eric Kay was convicted in 2022 of giving a fentanyl-laced pill to Skaggs that led to his death. Kay is serving a 22-year federal prison sentence.

The Skaggs family is seeking $118 million and possible additional damages, claiming the team violated its rules requiring intervention, including potential dismissal, of any employee known to be abusing drugs. The family asserts that allowing Kay to interact with Skaggs, when both had addiction problems, set the conditions for disaster.

Plaintiff’s attorney Shawn Holley said in her opening statement last week that the Angels put Skaggs “directly in harm’s way” by continuing to employ Eric Kay.

Camela Kay testified that, after an attempted intervention Oct. 1, 2017, when the couple was still married, Mead and Taylor came to the Kay home. She said Mead returned the next day to check on Kay. During that time, she testified, Mead came out of the Kay bedroom holding “six or seven” baggies of about six white pills each. Camela Kay used her fingers to show the size of the baggies, about 1 inch square.

“I was shocked,” she testified. “I questioned [Mead] and asked where he got those. He said Eric directed him and told him they were in shoeboxes.”

She said Mead then put them on a coffee table in front of where Eric Kay was sitting with Taylor.

In his earlier testimony, Mead said he recalled “very little of that morning” and did not remember asking Kay where drugs were, whether he went into Kay’s bedroom or if he found drugs in baggies there. Angels attorneys said in opening remarks that the team was not responsible for Skaggs’ death and was not aware of Skaggs’ illicit drug use or that Kay had provided drugs to multiple players. The defense also argued that Skaggs had used drugs when he was with the Arizona Diamondbacks, whom he played for before his time with the Angels.

Angels attorney Todd Theodora said it was Skaggs who “decided to obtain the illicit pills and take the illicit drugs along with the alcohol the night he died.”

Camela Kay testified she continued to have concerns about her ex-husband’s substance abuse and that she shared those concerns with Mead and Taylor.

She also said she never saw improvement in Eric Kay, even after he was sent to outpatient therapy following the failed 2017 intervention. Camela Kay testified — backed by text messages shown in court — that she had multiple conversations with Angels benefits manager Cecilia Schneider to get her husband into an outpatient rehabilitation program in 2017.

Kay also testified she had been on the Angels’ plane in the past and that she observed conduct on the plane that caused her concern. When asked about the conduct, she said, “I had seen them passing out pills and drinking alcohol excessively.”

Asked plaintiff’s attorney Leah Graham: “When you say observed them, who is the them?”

“Players, clubbies,” Kay replied, indicating she believed she saw Xanax and Percocet being handed out. She later said she was kept away from players on the plane, “but you can see what’s going on behind you” and when she would go to the bathroom.

In 2013, Camela Kay said, Mead and Taylor were at the team hotel after Eric Kay had a panic attack at Yankee Stadium in New York. It was there, Camela Kay said, where Eric Kay told her he was taking five Vicodin per day. She testified Taylor and Mead were there and heard the admission.

In 2019, she testified Monday afternoon, Taylor drove Eric Kay home after an episode of strange behavior at the office. She said she found a pill bottle in the gutter where Taylor’s car was parked, and she emptied the contents in front of Taylor — about 10 blue pills that she told him were oxycodone. She said she told Taylor her husband needed help. Eric Kay later went with his sister to the hospital, where he spent three days before starting outpatient rehab. She quoted Kay’s sister as saying the pills were for Skaggs.

In earlier testimony, Taylor said he drove Eric Kay home but denied that Camela Kay dumped blue pills out in front of him. He also denied that he was told they were oxycodone and that they were for Skaggs.

Camela Kay’s testimony continues Tuesday.

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