LAUSANNE, October 2, 2018 - A Der Spiegel investigation has revealed rape allegations at the address of global football star Cristiano Ronaldo. The story may destroy one of the sports’ all-time greats.
In a nutshell - Kathryn Mayorga has alleged that Cristiano Ronaldo raped her in a Las Vegas hotel room in 2009. She detailed the events in which the Portuguese forced her to have sex with him in the bathroom of his penthouse suite. She claimed she said no several times, but he ignored her. Mayorga also revealed the protracted legal process by which she subsequently agreed to settle the claims. It was an agreement which, her lawyers claim, was never honoured by Ronaldo and contains documents that prove he knew she had not consented.
Civil lawsuit - In an interview with Der Spiegel magazine, Mayorga said she had chosen to go public in the wake of the #MeToo revelations. By breaking her end of the agreement, she may now face the possibility of having to pay back $375,000 awarded to her eight years ago, on top of legal fees, in an out-of-court settlement reported by Der Spiegel. She is seeking another $200,000 in damages in a civil lawsuit. On Tuesday, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department confirmed that it re-opened the rape investigation into Cristiano Ronaldo. They said: “As of September 2018, the case has been reopened and our detectives are following up on information being provided by the victim.”
Fake news and personal rights - On Sunday the player himself had claimed on Instagram that the story was “fake, fake news” indicating that Mayorga wants to be as famous as him. His lawyers have threaded more cautiously and refrained from using ‘Trumpian’ speech. Christian Schertz, Ronaldo’s lawyer, said the Spiegel report “is manifestly illegal and violates the personal rights of our client Cristiano Ronaldo in an extremely serious way” and is “one of the most serious violations of personal rights in recent years.” Schertz thus didn’t dismiss the allegations as fake news.
Der Spiegel response - In a series of Tweets, Christoph Winterbach, sports editor at the German magazine, defended the publication “because Cristiano Ronaldo is one of the biggest celebrities in the world facing very serious allegations, and because there's a public complaint against him. We believe that we have every right to publish this story…If we didn't have this right, when would it ever be possible to publish about rape allegations? This is one of the most obvious cases of admissible reporting of suspicions! We have hundreds of uncontested documents from several sources to back the story up.”
Investigative journalism - Der Spiegel first reported the allegations in 2017, but it took time, manpower and corroborative evidence to tell the story. The magazine highlighted the meticulous approach it took in reporting the story, with access to hundreds of documents from different sources: e-mails, medical and police reports. Winterbach emphasised that ‘We have fact-checkers who check every single word of every single article.’ At least 20 people were involved in crafting the story and the article for weeks, always accompanied every step of the way by the magazine’s legal department.
Slow traction or not? The story is almost by default huge, yet it has seemingly taken time to hit the news with most outlets publishing cursory news wires. The accusations haven’t been top of news cycle, but that may also be a precaution: the story, the re-emergence of an old accusation, is complex and entails numerous different legal scenarios. What happens next is simply conjecture.
