Judge imposes €310,000 penalty on Ronaldo accuser’s Vegas lawyer

A lawyer has been hit with a $335,000 (€310,000) penalty for pressing a bid in US courts to force Cristiano Ronaldo to pay millions of dollars more than the $375,000 in hush money he paid to a Nevada woman who claimed he 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,” US District Judge Jennifer Dorsey said in a scathing 18-page ruling.

The judge in Las Vegas held Kathryn Mayorga’s lawyer, Leslie Mark Stovall, personally responsible for paying Ronaldo’s lawyers, led by Peter Christiansen and Kendelee Works.

Mr Stovall did not immediately respond to email and telephone messages about the ruling.

In a related case, a Nevada state court judge, who nearly made long-sealed and long-fought documents public by mistake in August, rejected Mr Stovall’s bid for a court order to unseal crucial documents, including a Las Vegas police report about Ms Mayorga’s rape complaint against the Portuguese football star.

“The decision regarding confidentiality is final,” Clark County District Court Judge Jasmin Lilly-Spells said in her ruling.

Judge Lilly-Spells pointed to Judge Dorsey’s earlier decisions to shield from public view the results of police investigations, a 2010 confidentiality agreement between Ronaldo and Ms 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 Judge Dorsey in federal court and the Las Vegas Review-Journal took the case to Judge Lilly-Spells in state court.

Mr Christiansen welcomed the federal and state court rulings and earlier findings in the case by a US magistrate