By: Ujan Chakraborty
Image Credit: Twitter
A Las Vegas attorney has been fined $335,000 for attempting to have Cristiano Ronaldo ordered to pay millions of dollars more than the $375,000 in hush money he gave to a Nevada woman who claimed the soccer star sexually assaulted her in Las Vegas in 2009.
The Las Vegas judge ordered plaintiff Kathryn Mayorga's lawyer, Leslie Mark Stovall, to personally pay Ronaldo's lawyers, Peter Christiansen and Kendelee Works.
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 contested documents public.
Lilly-Spells cited Dorsey's prior choices to conceal the findings of police inquiries from the public, a confidentiality agreement between Ronaldo and Mayorga from 2010, and allegedly stolen data of attorney-client conversations between Ronaldo and his lawyers.
Mayorga, a native of Las Vegas and a fashion model and tutor, She claimed in her lawsuit that she met Ronaldo at a nightclub and that they all afterwards returned to his hotel suite, where she claimed he abused her in a bedroom. He was 24 at the time, and she was 25.
Mayorga filed a lawsuit alleging that Ronaldo or his associates had broken the confidentiality agreement they had agreed to almost a decade earlier.
Following Mayorga's lawsuit, Las Vegas police resumed the rape investigation in 2018. However, in 2019, the elected prosecutor in Las Vegas determined that insufficient time had passed and that the available evidence did not demonstrate that Mayorga's accusation could be proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
Although the judge denied an additional $276,000 in court fees and charges that Ronaldo's attorneys requested, the judge considered their hourly rates—$850 for Christiansen, $500 for Works, and $350 for others—to be "fair" in the Las Vegas legal industry.
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