Shohei Ohtani’s imprisoned former interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, blames the baseball star’s “lifestyle” for his stealing and gambling.
“At the time, I couldn’t share this with Shohei, but it was hard for me to make my ends meet,” Ippei Mizuhara told reporter Tisha Thompson in audio obtained by Forbes from the new ESPN 30 For 30 podcast called The Betrayal of Shohei Ohtani. “I was kind of going paycheck to paycheck because I kind of had to keep up with his lifestyle…
“I didn’t want to go to him for help financially, stuff like that. So I was just trying to make ends meet on my side and I was in debt a little bit and stuff with, like, my parents and some friends.”
Mizuhara initially said Ohtani knew about the money transfers
As Ohtani’s interpreter for the Los Angeles Angels, Mizuhara said he made $85,000 per year. In addition to attributing his initial financial difficulties to his employment with Ohtani, Mizuhara also claimed that Ohtani consented to settle the debt on Mizuhara’s behalf through $500,000 in wire transfers that Mizuhara recorded as “loans” in his bank account.
“He knew the whole amount, and he knew we had to make several payments because we couldn’t send more than $500,000 at a time,” Ippei Mizuhara, who was sentenced to 57 months in prison in 2025 for bank fraud and filing a false tax return, claimed. “I would do it with him every time.”
Ohtani would later assert that he was unaware of the money transfers Mizuhara made because he translated almost all of his conversations and Mizuhara deliberately concealed information while embezzling millions from him. Federal investigators and Major League Baseball eventually cleared Ohtani of any wrongdoing.
“I’m going to pay him back,” Mizuhara told Thompson. “I told him I’m going to pay him back. It might take a while, but I told him, even if he says no, I’m going to make all the effort to pay him back.”
In previously released audio from the podcast, Ippei Mizuhara can be heard pretending to be Shoehi Ohtani during a February 2022 call attempting to approve a money transfer to the account of Mathew Bowyer, a former bookmaker from Southern California.
Bowyer, while awaiting sentencing for his role in the scandal, claimed he believes the Dodgers star knew about Mizuhara’s illegal gambling, but also stated that he believes Ohtani did not place any sports bets or wagers himself because Ohtani was at baseball games while someone else placed bets.