Meet Morganna, Arrested 16 Times For Kissing Baseball Players

When Morganna Roberts was 17 and attending a Cincinnati Reds game, a friend dared her to run onto the field and kiss Pete Rose. It didn't go so well. Pete, taken by surprise, started swearing, so Morganna regretted taking the dare. The next night, however, Pete tracked her down to the strip club where she worked, apologized for swearing, and gifted her a dozen roses.

Morganna (as she became known professionally, without a surname) now realized she had a mission: to keep invading the field and kiss more and more players. From when she started in 1969 to when her career wound down 20 years later, she kissed 37 MLB players, plus dozens more in the minor leagues and in the NBA. To keep it all family friendly, she always kissed on the cheek—with the exception of one target, the San Diego Chicken, whom she kissed on the beak.

Through all this, she became famous enough to get her own baseball card and also to appear in Playboy twice. She also ended up becoming a part owner in a baseball club, and she met her husband by becoming rich—she married her accountant.

But it was challenging, being Morganna the Kissing Bandit. The whole point of her gimmick was that she was breaking the rules by invading games, not just kissing players when they were on the street or whatever. As a result, sports stadiums had her arrested at least 16 times for trespassing. When she tried storming Cincinnati's Great American Ball Park (sometime after the original Pete Rose quest), security guards got her to the ground and beat her. Another time, she broke multiple ribs jumping from the stands onto the field.

Sometimes, the arrests meant getting tossed in jail briefly, but one time in Houston, they actually put her on trial to convict her. Her lawyer put on what she'd later call the "Law of Gravity defense." He argued that she hadn't intentionally dropped from the stands at all. Instead, he said, the problem was that her massive chest pulled her down. She had a 60-inch chest (she wore a custom I-cup bra), so when she leaned over a little to look at a foul ball, physics did the inevitable.

The judge dismissed the charge. He was laughing while doing so, so it's possible he was open to dismissing it regardless.

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