A judge sanctions the lawyer of the accuser of Cristiano in the United States

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A Las Vegas lawyer will be fined $335,000 for falsely insisting on filing a lawsuit to have Cristiano Ronaldo pay millions of dollars to a woman who accused him of raped in 2009. .

The sanction was handed down by a judge against the woman’s attorney in the state of Nevada with whom Cristiano had a previous agreement in which he paid $375,000 in exchange for the charges being dropped.

“I find that Ronaldo would not have incurred most of the fees and costs that he would have had to cover in this litigation had the defendant’s judge not acted in such bad faith,” U.S. District Judge Jennifer determined. Dorsey in an 18-page decision.

The Las Vegas judge said Leslie Mark Stovall, attorney for whistleblower Kathryn Mayorga, is personally responsible for paying Cristiano’s attorneys, 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 decision.

In a related case, a Nevada state judge, who almost mistakenly released a series of long-held documents in August, rejected Stovall’s bid to get a court order to release crucial information.

Among those documents is a Las Vegas police report on Mayorga’s complaint against Ronaldo for the alleged rape.

“The decision on confidentiality is final,” Judge Jasmin Lilly-Spells said in her ruling, also released on Tuesday.

Lilly-Spells recalled Dorsey’s earlier failures to prevent the public from learning the results of police investigations, a 2010 confidentiality agreement between Cristiano and Mayorga, and allegedly stolen records of 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 Lilly-Spells’ case to state court.

Christiansen praised the federal and state rulings, as well as the precedents handed down in the case by a federal magistrate in Las Vegas. He said these show “that hard-working judges do not allow lawyers to abuse the system”.

But the decisions do not mark the end of more than four years of legal wrangling.

Stovall is asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to overturn Dorsey’s June ruling, which dismissed the civil lawsuit Mayorga filed in September 2018 in state court and transferred in January 2019 to federal court .

If Stovall also appeals the monetary penalty, the appeals judges could consider all issues together.