Latest wild Ippei Mizuhara twist includes translator impersonating Shohei Ohtani

Shohei Ohtani's former interpreter and confidante, Ippei Mizuhara, is still awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to defrauding the Los Angeles Dodgers star of some $17 million, but more details continue to trickle out about the exact nature of Mizuhara's crimes.

We'd previously learned that Mizuhara's fraud went far beyond a gambling addiction, using his access to Ohtani's bank accounts to pay for some $325,000 worth of baseball cards. But just what else Mizuhara was using the money for, and how exactly he was able to gain unfettered access to Ohtani's money, remained open questions — until now, that is.

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Ippei Mizuhara impersonated Shohei Ohtani in order to defraud Dodgers star

The Athletic's Evan Drellich and Sam Blum were able to obtain a court filing submitted in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on Thursday, and the details are shocking. Mizuhara's gambling is somehow even worse than previously thought: "Between December 2021 and January 2024," Drellich and Blum write, "Mizuhara placed approximately 19,000 bets online through bookie Matthew Bowyer. He racked up a debt of $40.7 million."

But Ohtani was unwittingly funding much more than just Mizuhara's sports bets. According to The Athletic's report, Ohtani also cut his interpreter a check for $60,000, which he thought was being used for Mizuhara's dental care. Instead, however, Mizuhara simply pocketed the money: “Instead of using the check to pay for the dental work, defendant deposited the check into his personal bank account and then used Mr. Ohtani’s debit card to pay for the dental work, without Mr. Ohtani’s authorization or knowledge,” assistant U.S. attorney Jeff Mitchell wrote in the filing.

Mizuhara was apparently able to gain unfettered access to Ohtani's finances, routing Ohtani's online accounts to his own email and phone number to allow him to bypass two-factor authentication. Mizuhara even went so far as to call banks pretending to be Ohtani in order to initiate six-figure wire transfers, a recording of which The Athletic was able to obtain.

The recording features Mizuhara's voice claiming to be Ohtani, entering a six-digit security code sent to his phone and pretending that the transfer was to pay off a car loan.

The more details that come out in this story, the clearer it becomes that Ohtani wasn't some co-conspirator here, as some particularly unhinged conspiracy theories have tried to claim. Instead, he was a rich, famous and busy athlete who placed his trust in someone he thought was a close friend. Maybe a little too much trust, sure, but Mizuhara would clearly stop at nothing to steal and spend as much of Ohtani's money as he could get his hands on.