A ruling has not been immediately issued by the United States appeals court following the presentation of arguments on Wednesday by lawyers seeking to revive a woman’s attempt to cоmpel international soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo to pay more than the $375,000 in hush money he provided her after she accused him of rаpe in Las Vegas in 2009.

The woman’s attorney is urging the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the case’s dismissal in June 2022 and reopen the civil lawsuit she initially filed in Nevada in 2018.

The appeal asserts that the federal court judge in Nevada made errors in repeatedly denying the woman’s requests to unseal and use the confidentiality agreement she signed in 2010 when she accepted payments from Ronaldo as evidence.

After approximately 45 minutes of оral arguments from lawyers representing Ronaldo and his accuser, Kathryn Mayorga, Judge Johnnie Rawlinson declared the three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based appellate court in recess. They will consider the appeal as submitted.

The Associated Press typically does not disclоse the identities of sexuаl аssаult victims, but Mayorga provided consent through her lawyers to make her nаme public, including Leslie Mark Stovall.

The timing of the court’s decision is unclear, but it is likely to be at least several weeks and possibly months away.

Ronaldo is one of the world’s most well-known and affluent athletes. He has led Portugal’s national team and played for Real Madrid in Spain, Juventus in Italy, Manchester United in England, and currently plays for Al Nassr, a professional team in Saudi Arabia.

During a special session of the appellate court held at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas law school, Ninth Circuit Judges Rawlinson and John Owens, along with 5th Circuit Judge Sidney Fitzwater from Texas, posed questions to the lawyers. Many of these questions centered around leaked documents related to the confidentiality agreement.

After Mayorga filed her lawsuit, Las Vegas police reopened a rаpe investigation, but in 2019, Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson decided not to pursue criminal charges, citing the passage of too much time and insufficient evidence to support Mayorga’s accusation in court.

Mayorga, a former teacher and model from the Las Vegas area, was 25 years old when she met Ronaldo at a nightclub in 2009 and accompanied him and others to his hotel suite. She alleges in her lawsuit, filed nearly a decade later, that Ronaldo, who was 24 at the time, sexually assaulted her in a bedroom.

Ronaldo, through his legal representatives, has consistently asserted that the sexuаl encounter was consensual. In 2010, they reached a confidentiality agreement in which Stovall acknowledged Mayorga received $375,000.

In dismissing the case last year, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Dorsey in Las Vegas imposed a $335,000 fine on Mayorga’s lead attorney, Stovall, for acting in “bad faith” by filing the case on his client’s behalf, a highly unusual step.

Stovall’s appeal on behalf of Mayorga, submitted in March, characterizes Dorsey’s ruling as “a manifest abuse of discretion” and seeks to unseal the records and revive the case.

The appeal contends that Mayorga was not bound by the confidentiality agreement because Ronaldo or his associates violated it prior to the publication of an article by the German news outlet Der Spiegel in April 2017, titled “Cristiano Ronaldo’s Sеcrеt,” which was based on documents obtained from a “whistleblower portal” known as Football Leaks.

Ronaldo’s legal team argued, and the judge concurred, that the “Football Leaks” documents and the confidentiality agreement were the result of privileged attorney-client discussions, their authenticity was not guaranteed, and they could not be considered as evidence.