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A U.S. judge has dismissed the 2018 Nevada case, accusing Cristiano Ronaldo of rape in 2009 and asking the Portuguese football star to pay the alleged victim $ 25 million in damages after she agreed to accept $ 375,000 in secret money during the alleged attack, according to court documents. .
Judge Jennifer Dorsey dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice.
The lawsuit is based on a series of articles called Football Leaks, which cite leaked documents containing confidential information from Ronaldo’s legal team.
“The article makes it clear that its source documents include confidential internal communications between Ronaldo’s American and European lawyers, which were stolen from their databases despite precautionary measures designed to protect confidential information for clients,” Dorsey said in a statement. 42 pages.
The plaintiff’s lawyer, Leslie Stoval, searched for these hacked documents, which Dorsey said were “embellished with notices that their contents contained communication between a lawyer and a client and a lawyer’s work product” and claimed that Stoval had not notified the opposite. a lawyer that he holds such documents, even though they know their obvious privileged nature. “
The judge also said that plaintiff Catherine Mayorga – a former model and teacher in Las Vegas – relied on documents to tell her version of events from the night of the alleged attack, which took place in a hotel room in Las Vegas in 2009, when she was 24 and he was 25.
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Mayorga claims that after meeting Ronaldo, he invited her to his hotel room and offered her something to wear in his jacuzzi. She also claims that while she was changing in his room, he pulled her to his bed and raped her, despite her repeated allegations that she would stop. Ronaldo’s legal team does not deny that the couple had sexual intercourse, but insists that it was by mutual consent.
A lawsuit filed in U.S. court in Las Vegas accusing Ronaldo of rape in 2009 demanded $ 25 million in damages from the footballer after the plaintiff agreed to accept $ 375,000 in secret money after the alleged attack. (AP Photo / Bernat Armangue, file)
The plaintiff reported the incident at the Las Vegan Police Department (LVMPD) at the time, but no charges were filed after Mayorga neither identified her alleged attacker by name nor said where the incident occurred when she reported the incident, police and prosecutors said.
The LVMPD resumed the case years later and “issued an arrest warrant for Ronaldo, but in July 2019, the Clark County District Attorney’s Office announced that it would not prosecute,” court documents said.
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Stoval claims that Ronaldo’s legal team failed to protect the documents, which eventually expired, and that the plaintiff’s legal team “was not the one who misappropriated the documents.”
However, Dorsey said Football Leaks were “textbook examples of materials that fall exactly into the heart of Nevada’s client lawyer privilege and federal work product doctrine,” adding that the plaintiff’s technical arguments did not clearly change the privileged nature of these documents. “.
Catherine Mayorga’s lawyer, Leslie Mark Stoval, spoke at a press conference on October 3, 2018 in Las Vegas about the accusation of rape against Portuguese football star Cristiano Ronaldo. (MARK RALSTON / AFP)
After years of talks between the two legal teams on the hacked material, Dorsey concluded that although “the court is sensitive to the severity of sanctions for terminating the case”, due to “Stoval’s abuses and the obvious circumvention of the proper judicial process, [the plaintiff] he loses the opportunity to pursue this case and to try to stop the settlement of claims, which in themselves involve serious allegations of an extremely personal nature. “
“Nothing less than dismissal with prejudice will clear the stain that has penetrated this case from the very beginning and will preserve the integrity of the trial,” the judge wrote.
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Stoval can appeal the decision to the 9th U.S. District Court of Appeal in San Francisco.
Ronaldo, now 37, is one of the highest paid and most recognizable sports stars in the world. He plays for the English Premier League club Manchester United and is captain of the national team of his native Portugal. He spent the last few years playing in Italy for the Turin-based club Juventus.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Audrey Conklin is a digital reporter for FOX Business and Fox News. Email advice to audrey.conklin@fox.com or on Twitter at @audpants.
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