A Las Vegas lawyer has been hit with a £277,966 ($335,000) penalty for pressing a bid in U.S. courts to force Cristiano Ronaldo to pay millions of dollars more than the £311,156 ($375,000) in hush money he paid to a Nevada woman who claimed the international football star raped her in Las Vegas in 2009.
“I find that Ronaldo would not have incurred a majority of the fees and costs that he spent on this litigation absent plaintiff’s counsel’s bad faith,” U.S. District Judge Jennifer Dorsey said in an 18-page ruling.
The judge in Las Vegas held plaintiff Kathryn Mayorga’s attorney, Leslie Mark Stovall, personally responsible for paying Ronaldo’s attorneys, led by Peter Christiansen and Kendelee Works.
Stovall and associates in the case, Ross Moynihan and Larissa Drohobyczer, did not immediately respond Wednesday to email and telephone messages about the ruling issued Tuesday.
In a related case, a Nevada state court judge who nearly made long-sealed and long-fought documents public by mistake in August rejected Stovall’s bid for a court order to unseal crucial documents, including a Las Vegas police report about Mayorga’s rape complaint against Ronaldo.
“The decision regarding confidentiality is final,” Clark County District Court Judge Jasmin Lilly-Spells said in her ruling, also issued Tuesday.
Lilly-Spells pointed to Dorsey’s earlier decisions to shield from public view the results of police investigations, a 2010 confidentiality agreement between Ronaldo and Mayorga and allegedly stolen records of attorney-client discussions between Ronaldo and his lawyers.
The New York Times began a fight to release the records before Dorsey in federal court and the Las Vegas Review-Journal took the case to Lilly-Spells in state court.
Christiansen welcomed the federal and state court rulings and earlier findings in the case by a U.S. magistrate judge in Las Vegas, saying they showed “hard-working judges don’t allow lawyers to abuse the system.”
But the rulings aren’t quite the end of more than four years of legal battles.
Stovall is asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to overturn Dorsey’s dismissal last June of Mayorga’s civil lawsuit, filed in September 2018 in state court and moved in January 2019 to federal court. If Stovall also appeals the monetary sanction, the appellate judges might consider the matters together.
The Associated Press generally does not name people who say they are victims of sexual assault, but Mayorga gave consent through Stovall and Drohobyczer to make her name public.
Mayorga is a former model and teacher who lives in the Las Vegas area. Her lawsuit said she met Ronaldo at a nightclub and went with him and other people to his hotel suite, where she alleged he assaulted her in a bedroom. She was 25 at the time and he was 24.
