A Las Vegas woman has publicly come forward with rape allegations against Portugal and Juventus superstar Cristiano Ronaldo.
Kathryn Mayorga said the Portuguese footballer raped her in a Las Vegas hotel in 2009 while she repeatedly screamed no, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in Clark County.
After the attack, according to the lawsuit, Ronaldo apologized, “stating he was sorry, he was usually a gentleman.” The lawsuit alleges that Ronaldo himself told his team of fixers that “she said ‘no’ and ‘stop’ several times.”
Mayorga’s lawsuit accuses Ronaldo 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.
When reached by CNN, Mayorga’s attorney declined to comment beyond what was said in the lawsuit.
Ronaldo’s representatives denied the rape allegations when German publication Der Spiegel first reported them in 2017. After the outlet broke the news of the lawsuit on 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.”
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