For attempting to have Cristiano Ronaldo pay millions of dollars more than the $375,000 in hush money he paid to a Nevada woman who claimed the international soccer star sexually assaulted her in Las Vegas in 2009, a Las Vegas attorney has been fined $335,000.
In a harsh 18-page decision, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Dorsey stated, “I find that Ronaldo would not have incurred a majority of the fees and costs that he expended on this action absent plaintiff’s counsel’s bad faith.”
Leslie Mark Stovall, the attorney representing Kathryn Mayorga, the plaintiff, was ordered by the Las Vegas judge to personally pay Peter Christiansen and Kendelee Works, Ronaldo’s attorneys.
Ross Moynihan and Larissa Drohobyczer, who were also involved in the case with Stovall, did not answer right away on Wednesday to emails and phone calls concerning the decision made on Tuesday.
In a related matter, a judge in Nevada’s state court rejected Stovall’s request for a court order to unseal critical records, including a police report from Las Vegas regarding Mayorga’s rape complaint against Ronaldo. In August, the judge almost accidentally made long-sealed and long-fought documents public.
Judge Jasmin Lilly-Spells of the Clark County District Court stated in her decision, which was also delivered on Tuesday, “The decision regarding secrecy is definitive.”
Lilly-Spells cited Dorsey’s past choices to hide the findings of police inquiries from the public, a confidentiality agreement between Ronaldo and Mayorga from 2010, and allegedly stolen records of attorney-client conversations between Ronaldo and his attorneys.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal brought the matter to Lilly-Spells in state court, and the New York Times fought for the release of the information before Dorsey in federal court.
Christiansen praised the decisions made by the federal and state courts as well as the earlier conclusions reached in the case by a U.S. magistrate judge in Las Vegas, saying they demonstrated that “hard-working judges don’t allow lawyers to misuse the system.”
But despite the verdicts, the more than four years of court cases are far from over.
Mayorga’s civil action was filed in state court in September 2018 and transferred to federal court in January 2019. Stovall is requesting that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reverse Dorsey’s dismissal of Mayorga’s case in June of last year. If Stovall challenges the monetary penalty as well, the appellate court can take both cases into account.
In general, the Associated Press does not identify those who claim to have been sexually assaulted, but Mayorga obtained permission through Stovall and Drohobyczer to have her name made public.
Mayorga is a local of Las Vegas who has worked as a model and a teacher in the past. She met Ronaldo at a nightclub, went to his hotel suite with him and other people, and said he abused her in a bedroom, according to her lawsuit. He was 24 and she was 25 at the time.
One of the most known sports figures in the world is Ronaldo, who is now 38. He led the Portugal national team while playing professionally for Real Madrid in Spain and Juventus in Italy, both of which are situated in Turin.
He agreed to a lucrative offer in December to leave English Premier League team Manchester United and join Saudi Arabian team Al Nassr. According to news reports, Ronaldo may receive up to $200 million annually from the agreement through June 2025. He would thereafter hold the record for being paid the most in soccer history.
Prior to the German news outlet Der Spiegel publishing an article titled “Cristiano Ronaldo’s Secret” in 2017 based on documents obtained from “whistleblower portal Football Leaks,” Mayorga filed a lawsuit alleging that Ronaldo or his associates had broken the confidentiality agreement they had agreed to almost a decade earlier.
Stovall insisted Mayorga didn’t violate the hush-money agreement and never wanted to be publicly identified. She filed a lawsuit to have it thrown out, charging Ronaldo and his agents with conspiracy, slander, contract breach, coercion, and fraud.
Stovall calculated damages at $25 million plus attorney fees in documents submitted in 2021.
For years, Christiansen and Works worked on numerous fronts to keep the secrecy agreement secret. They claimed that Stovall fraudulently employed Mayorga in an effort to profit from Ronaldo’s notoriety and wealth.
Mayorga, now 39, was under extreme duress from Ronaldo’s legal team and representatives, according to Stovall, and as a result, she was unable to consent to dropping the $375,000 reward and dropping the criminal complaint she had filed soon after her encounter with Ronaldo. Mayorga had learning disabilities as a child.
No one disputes that Ronaldo and Mayorga had sex in June 2009, but Ronaldo’s legal team insisted it was consensual and not rape.
The lawsuits Stovall filed are “attempts to unwind a years-old settlement agreement regarding serious allegations of potentially criminal acts, fraud, and civil conspiracy among an internationally recognized athlete and a team of ‘fixers’ that spanned multiple continents,” according to a summary of Dorsey’s decision this week.
The judge claimed that Stovall had “sought out and relied on the cyber-hacked, privileged documents of Cristiano Ronaldo’s counsel to resurrect Mayorga’s long-since-released claims, tainting this case” past repair. She continued, “unenthusiastically” dismissing the case “as a penalty for such bad-faith legal representation.”
Following Mayorga’s lawsuit, Las Vegas police reopened the rape investigation in 2018. But in 2019, the elected prosecutor in Las Vegas determined that insufficient time had gone and that the available evidence did not demonstrate that Mayorga’s accusation could be proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
The punishment Dorsey imposed in her decision on Tuesday was significant since it was about $40,000 less than the sum Mayorga was admitted to have received in 2010.
The judge denied Ronaldo’s lawyers’ request for an additional $276,000 in court expenses and fees, but she thought their hourly rates of $850 for Christiansen, $500 for Works, and $350 for others were “fair” in the context of the Las Vegas legal market.
