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Ex-lover goes to court over De La Hoya lingerie photos

Some court hearings are about the law; some are about the facts. But Friday's hearing, at which boxer Oscar De La Hoya was due in court, was simply about the show.

The ex-mistress, Milana Dravnel, appeared outside the courthouse, surrounded by the various mutts and rats who carry pads and cameras in New York. Her patent leather handbag matched her boots.

"I've been hurt by Oscar," she told the gathered press. "This is my only option. I just want to move on with a positive outcome."

Her lawyer, Salvatore Strazzullo, spelled his name for the television cameras.

"How you doin', guys?" he inquired of the reporters. "We just want the truth to come out. We just want to restore the reputation, the integrity, of my client."

His client -- a model and a former striptease dancer -- filed a US$25 million lawsuit against De La Hoya in November. The suit accuses him of fraud, defamation and the infliction of emotional distress, charging that he forced Dravnel to recant a story that she told last year on the television program Entertainment Tonight.

That story concerned some photographs said to have been taken of De La Hoya one night last May at a hotel in Philadelphia. They showed De La Hoya, a 35-year-old welterweight, dressed in fishnets and a tutu. The pictures found their way onto the Internet. De La Hoya argued that they were altered. After going on TV to say that they were real, Dravnel then told the Daily News that they were not.

Now she claims that one of De La Hoya's lawyers coerced her into signing an agreement to change her mind -- an accusation that his current lawyers say is false. Since recanting, her lawsuit says, she has suffered "severe levels of stress, anxiety and depression."

Dravnel, 22, told reporters that she had not been a stripper for at least a year and a half and in fact was trying "something else." Strazzullo played the role of her protector.

"He called her a liar, a fake, `just a stripper,"' he said of De La Hoya. "Well, a stripper, maybe, but at a place he frequented many times."

Inside the courthouse, the action was somewhat less active. De La Hoya had decided not to appear. When Dravnel was told of this, she turned around and left. The whole point, Strazzullo said, had been to see the man in court.

That left a hearing to be held with neither a defendant nor a plaintiff. The judge came in, set a schedule for motions, then stood and left.
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