Lawyers for Kathryn Mayorga, the American model who accused Cristiano Ronaldo of rape, are trying to reopen the case, filed last year, before an appeals court in the United States. According to the Associated Press news agency, they want to impose millionaire compensation on the Portuguese star, who paid US$375,000 to Mayorga in a confidentiality agreement signed in 2010.
The model accuses her attacker of raping her in 2009, in Las Vegas, but the filed action was only opened in 2018, in the Federal Court of Nevada. During the process, she wanted to include the confidentiality agreement as proof of the rape, but the responsible judge rejected this attempt, which the lawyers consider an error of justice and use as an argument to annul the filing and reopen the case.
The request for reopening is expected to be heard by three San Francisco judges at an appeals court in Nevada this Wednesday, with the participation of Cristiano Ronaldo’s defense. The decision on the next steps, however, should not be made immediately.
Mayorga was 25 when she met Ronaldo at a nightclub in 2009 and went with him and others to a hotel suite. In her lawsuit filed in 2018, she alleges that the Portuguese star, then 24 years old, sexually assaulted her in a bedroom. The player stated that the sex was consensual. The two reached a confidentiality agreement in 2010, and attorney Leslie Mark Stovall acknowledged that Mayorga received $375,000.
In dismissing the case last year, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Dorsey in Las Vegas fined Stovall $335,000 for acting in “bad faith” in bringing the case on behalf of her client. lawyer on Mayorga’s behalf, filed in March, calls Dorsey’s decision “a manifest abuse of discretion.”
The player’s lawyers argued, and the judge agreed, that “the confidentiality agreement is the product of privileged discussions between attorney and client, and that there is no guarantee that they are authentic and cannot be considered as evidence.”
