Ronaldo sued over alleged rape

(CNN)A woman has accused Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the world’s biggest soccer stars, of raping her in a Las Vegas hotel room in 2009.
Kathryn Mayorga says the Portuguese footballer, who now plays for Italian club Juventus, raped her while she repeatedly screamed no, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in Clark County, Nevada.
After the attack, according to the lawsuit, Ronaldo apologised, “stating he was sorry, he was usually a gentleman.” The lawsuit alleges that Ronaldo told his representatives that “she said ‘no’ and ‘stop’ several times.”
Mayorga’s lawsuit accuses Ronaldo, 33, and his team of taking advantage of her fragile emotional state to coerce her into signing a settlement and nondisclosure agreement in 2009. She claims she received $375,000 in exchange for her silence. Her lawsuit seeks to void the settlement and agreement.
Ronaldo’s representatives denied the rape allegations when German publication Der Spiegel first reported them in 2017. After the outlet broke news of the lawsuit Friday in an interview with Mayorga, Ronaldo’s lawyer called the reporting “blatantly illegal.“
“It violates the personal rights of our client Cristiano Ronaldo in an exceptionally serious way. This is an inadmissible reporting of suspicions in the area of privacy,” lawyer Christian Schertz said in a statement.
Ronaldo appeared to dispute the claims in an Instagram live post on Friday: “What they said today, fake — fake news. They want to promote by my name. It’s normal. They want to be famous — to say my name. Yeah but it’s part of the job. I’m (a) happy man and all, all good.”
Reached by CNN on Sunday, Mayorga’s attorney, Leslie Stovall, declined an interview request. But Stovall released a statement Monday in response to Ronaldo’s Instagram post.
He said the complaint, the physical evidence, Ronaldo’s alleged answers to questions about the assault, the circumstances of the settlement, and Mayorga’s “psychological injuries” are not fake news.
His client is seeking justice, he said, to hold the soccer star accountable, to protect other women, to demonstrate how “fixers” enable sexual assault, and to convince victims to pursue charges against alleged perpetrators, “no matter how wealthy, famous or powerful they may appear to be.”
Mayorga met Ronaldo at the now-closed Rain nightclub, inside the Palms Hotel and Casino on June 13, 2009, the complaint says. Ronaldo invited her, her friend and others to his penthouse suite. According to Mayorga’s lawsuit, Ronaldo asked her to join the group in a jacuzzi and gave her shorts and a T-shirt to wear.
As Mayorga changed in a bathroom, she said Ronaldo approached her, exposed himself and asked her for oral sex. Mayorga said she refused, but that Ronaldo pulled her into a bedroom and raped her as she screamed, “No, no, no.”
The same day, she reported the incident to police and went to the hospital for a sexual assault examination, the lawsuit says.
Initially, she refused to identify Ronaldo to police, fearing public humiliation, her complaint says. Weeks later, when she named him in a police interview, a detective told her that she would be subjected to retaliation and her actions portrayed as extortion attempts, according to the lawsuit. A nurse who examined her said the same thing, she says in the lawsuit.