LAS VEGAS (AP) — A Las Vegas lawyer will have to pay a $335,000 penalty for improperly insisting on filing a court case for Cristiano Ronaldo to shell out millions of dollars to a woman who accused him of raping her in 2009. .
The sanction was imposed by a judge once morest the lawyer of the woman from the state of Nevada with whom Cristiano had already reached a previous arrangement through which he had paid $375,000 in exchange for leaving behind the accusations.
“I find that Ronaldo would not have incurred most of the fees and costs that he should have covered in this litigation if the defendant’s judge had not shown this bad faith,” U.S. District Judge Jennifer Dorsey determined in an 18-page ruling.
The judge in Las Vegas said Leslie Mark Stovall, attorney for whistleblower Kathryn Mayorga, is personally responsible for paying Cristiano’s lawyers, led by Peter Christiansen and Kendelee Works.
Stovall and his associates in the case, Ross Moynihan and Larissa Drohobyczer, did not return phone and email messages Wednesday seeking comment on Tuesday’s ruling.
In a related case, a Nevada state judge, who nearly mistakenly disclosed a series of documents long kept secret in August, rejected Stovall’s attempt to obtain a court order to release crucial information.
Among those documents is a Las Vegas police report on Mayorga’s complaint once morest Ronaldo for the alleged rape.
“The decision on confidentiality is final,” Judge Jasmin Lilly-Spells ruled in her ruling, also issued Tuesday.
Lilly-Spells recalled Dorsey’s previous failures to prevent the public from learning the results of police investigations, a confidentiality agreement reached in 2010 between Cristiano and Mayorga, and allegedly stolen files on discussions between the footballer and his lawyers.
The New York Times had launched a fight to release the files in federal court. Another newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, took the case before Lilly-Spells in state court.
Christiansen welcomed the federal and state rulings, as well as previous ones issued in the case by a federal magistrate in Las Vegas. He considered that these show “that hard-working judges do not allow lawyers to abuse the system.”
But the rulings do not mark the end of more than four years of legal wrangling.
Stovall is asking the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to reverse the June decision by Dorsey, who dismissed the civil lawsuit filed by Mayorga in September 2018 in state court and transferred in January 2019 before a federal court.
If Stovall also appeals the monetary penalty, the appellate judges might consider all the issues together.
