Lawyers for Cristiano Ronaldo on Friday said they would sue German magazine Der Spiegel after it published “blatantly illegal” accusations by a US woman who alleges she was raped by the Portuguese soccer star in 2009.
Ronaldo’s lawyer Christian Schertz said in a statement that the report was “an inadmissible reporting of suspicions in the area of privacy,” and that he would seek legal redress for his client.
The statement was sent to reporters by Ronaldo’s agent Gestifute in response to a request for comment on the Der Spiegel story.
Gestifute did not answer any specific questions about the content of the report, which reporters were unable to independently verify.
The magazine said the rape allegedly took place in June 2009 in a Las Vegas hotel room, according to Leslie Mark Stovall, lawyer for the alleged victim, Kathryn Mayorga.
Ronaldo and Mayorga then reached an out-of-court agreement, according to Stovall as reported in the magazine.
It said that according to Stovall, she had pledged never to speak of the accusation again and Ronaldo paid her US$375,000.
“Kathryn was sexually assaulted in June 2009 by an individual named Cristiano Ronaldo,” Mayorga’s lawyer, Leslie Mark Stovall, said in a video published online by Der Spiegel.
Stovall did not immediately respond to e-mail requests for comment and Mayorga was not available for comment in telephone calls to her home.
However, her lawyer told Der Spiegel that he had filed a civil complaint seeking to declare the non-disclosure agreement void.
“The purpose of this lawsuit is to hold Cristiano Ronaldo responsible within a civil court of law for the injuries he has caused Kathryn Mayorga and the consequences of those injuries,” Stovall told the magazine.
Schertz said he would seek compensation from Der Spiegel for “moral damages in an amount corresponding to the gravity of the infringement, which is probably one of the most serious violations of personal rights in recent years.”
The magazine’s deputy editor-in-chief Alfred Weinzierl told reporters that Der Spiegel had repeatedly written to Ronaldo’s management and lawyers about the allegations before publishing its report.
“We sent written questions, to which there were no answers. Nobody sued us in connection with earlier Ronaldo reports,” he said in an e-mail.
Mayorga told Der Spiegel she no longer felt bound by the non-disclosure agreement as she suffers from the consequences of the night nine years ago.
“I’ve had like these serious breakdowns,” she told the magazine. “And again, blaming of the rape. And I blame him, and I blame myself for signing that thing.”
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