The Yankees want 10-year-old Cassidy Slater to know she’s not alone, as she described in painstaking detail in a selfie video posted to Facebook about her experience as a victim of bullying.
Yankees manager Aaron Boone and 23 players, mirroring the poignant format of Slater’s video, shared hand-written messages of support in a two-and-a-half minute clip that ended with Boone suggesting Slater was invited to meet the team in person.
Slater’s story, which she shared on social media last week unbeknownst to her parents, caught the attention of celebrities, like Hugh Jackman, in addition to the Yankees, after she described suffering from four years of abuse at her elementary school in Scranton, Pennsylvania. After introducing herself — “My name is Cassidy. I’m 10 years old,” reads the first message — Slater filters through sheets of paper with increasingly more harrowing stories of four students hitting and kicking her, encouraging kids not to sit with her at lunch and telling her to kill herself.
“There’s 4 of them and only 1 of me,” Slater wrote. “The principal doesn’t do anything. I feel so alone I feel like I have no one. It hurts.”
CC Sabathia first tried to ease her pain with a “Dear Cassidy” note that begins the Yankees’ outpouring of support in the video, which they shared on their Twitter account.
“We may be older than you. We may be taller than you,” Greg Bird shared, with Dellin Betances finishing the thought: “But we want you to know that we look up to you.”
“You can sit next to us at lunch anytime,” Aaron Hicks’ message read. “In fact, we have a seat for you at our lunch table in the clubhouse.”
Since Slater posted her video, which her mother recirculated on her own page after Facebook took it down because of Cassidy’s age, Cassidy’s father met with school district officials to address the bullying situation, WNEP News reported.
“See you soon!” ended the Yankees’ video with a smiling Boone.