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A U.S. requests court has rejected an offer by the legal counselor for a lady attempting to drive Cristiano Ronaldo to pay millions more than the $375,000 in quiet cash he paid her after she denounced him of assaulting her in 2009.
Kathryn Mayorga's legal counselor had inquired the 9th Circuit Court of Requests to upset a government judge's rejection of the case in Las Vegas in June 2022 and revive the respectful claim she recorded in 2018.
Agreeing to Mail Online, they contended U.S. Locale Judge Jennifer Dorsey ought to not have rejected Mayorga's endeavors to unlock and make open the secrecy assention she marked in 2010 in tolerating installments from Ronaldo.
A three-judge board of the San Francisco-based re-appraising court oppose this idea. It too rejected their contention that the judge mishandled her watchfulness by rejecting the case with preference, which anticipated Mayorga from refiling the case, and took the bizarre step of requiring a $335,000 (£267,450) fine against her legal counselor, Leslie Check Stovall.
'The district court clearly recognized the gravity of dismissing the case and accordingly provided a thorough analysis, amply supported by factual findings,' Judge Johnnie Rawlinson wrote in Tuesday's six-page opinion.
In dismissing the case in Nevada, Dorsey sanctioned Stovall for 'bad faith,' saying he had improperly attempted to use documents that were leaked or stolen in a cyberattack to pursue Mayorga's case.
Stovall told the 9th Circuit panel during oral arguments in October that Mayorga wasn't bound by the confidentiality agreement because Ronaldo or his associates violated it before the German news outlet, Der Spiegel, published an article in April 2017 titled 'Cristiano Ronaldo's Secret' based on documents obtained from 'the whistleblower portal Football Leaks.'
Las Vegas police reopened a rape investigation after Mayorga's lawsuit was filed, but Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson decided in 2019 not to pursue criminal charges. He said too much time had passed and evidence failed to show that Mayorga's accusation could be proven to a jury.
Mayorga, a former teacher and model from the Las Vegas area, was 25 when she met Ronaldo at a nightclub in 2009 and went with him and other people to his hotel suite. She alleges in her lawsuit filed almost a decade later that the soccer star, then 24, sexually assaulted her in a bedroom.
Ronaldo, through his lawyers, maintained the sex was consensual and that the confidentiality agreement reached in 2010 was valid. Stovall acknowledged that Mayorga received the $375,000.
Mayorga's lawsuit claimed conspiracy, defamation, breach of contract, coercion and fraud. By the time Dorsey threw out the case, Stovall claimed Mayorga should receive for more than $25 million (£19.9m) in damages.
The 9th Circuit ruling on Tuesday noted the 2010 settlement 'lay dormant until 2017, when ... `Football Leaks' released hundreds of documents through a cyber hack of Ronaldo's former attorneys.'
'Despite the settlement and confidentiality agreement between Ronaldo and Mayorga, Stovall sought and used documents from 'Football Leaks' - including those clearly marked attorney-client privileged - to prosecute a new lawsuit on behalf of Mayorga against Ronaldo,' the circuit court said.
Judge Dorsey 'properly held that Ronaldo did not waive or otherwise forfeit his claim of attorney-client privilege as to the 'Football Leaks' documents,' it said.
The appellate judges specifically rejected Stoval's argument that Ronaldo failed to adequately safeguard the documents.
'Before the leak, his attorneys employed cybersecurity tools to protect their files,' the ruling said. 'As the district court noted, Ronaldo mistakenly produced the course of "navigating this unorthodox predicament," kicked off by Mayorga's counsel's "unprincipled conduct" long before, and instituted vigorous efforts to protect the documents afterwards.'
'The district court did not abuse its discretion when it found that a case-terminating sanction was appropriate,' the ruling said.
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