Why has the Ronaldo rape claim been so trivialised by celebrity circus?
THeRe is no suggestion Cristiano Ronaldo sexually assaulted his former girlfriends Gemma Atkinson, Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton or the supermodel Irina Shayk.
Still, an attorney in Las Vegas wishes to interview them, and wishes to talk about wishing to interview them, which is the most important thing.
It means stories can be run that place some very beautiful, and recognisable, women on the same page, or in the same bulletin, as a global celebrity beset by scandal. As someone who works in the industry: hubba, hubba.
A sexy rape case. No, it’s not an oxymoron. It’s where we are, incredibly.
It’s why the #MeToo movement has found its voice in Hollywood, but not the shop floor.
Harvey Weinstein has been taken down publicly — and amen to that, providing it all stands up — but creeps in offices and factories still get their comeuppance, if at all, in relative anonymity at tribunals and hearings that rarely make the news.
Is the Ronaldo rape allegation football’s #MeToo moment, we are asked. Actually, football had a #MeToo moment several years ago when shattering details of child abuse came into the public domain.
The problem with it was the paedophiles were nobodies, or dead, and their victims were just kids, who for the most part never got to be famous footballers, because their young lives were full of dread and terror. either way, you can’t put a photograph of Kim Kardashian on it: so we move on. Quite why attorney Leslie M Stovall would be any more interested in speaking to Gemma, Kim and Paris than, say, Karina, Jordana or Merche, depends on the news providers in your area.
Ronaldo has many ex- girlfriends, or certainly women with whom he has been romantically linked. In Portugal, for instance, Karina Ferro, Jordana Jardel and Merche Romero may score bigger recognition points than Gemma Atkinson, star of Emmerdale,
Hollyoaks and Casualty. So they get the play.
Whether a former partner, who may have her own issues, would be a valuable witness in court — given how the break-up of any relationship could be exploited during cross examination by Ronaldo’s lawyers — is open to question.
Yet by raising the possibility of a celebrity roll call on the witness stand, attorney Stovall keeps the story alive another day — and that raises the profile of his case and the possibility others might join.
Sure enough. ‘I have had a call from a woman who claims to have had a similar experience,’ Stovall announced at the weekend. Now he says there are three.
The CPS decided not to pursue an allegation of rape against Ronaldo from a British woman in 2005. The chauffeur who collected her from the Sanderson Hotel in Marylebone said she was ‘giggling’ and talking about the athlete’s ‘incredible body’. He said he was therefore surprised to hear of the claim at a later date. Has this woman contacted Stovall, or are there others?
Has Ronaldo been abusing women around the world, shielded by a cloak of wealth and celebrity throughout his career? Looking at the wickedness now seeping from the entertainment industry, he wouldn’t be alone.
Yet the women around Ronaldo were not dependent upon him for career breaks. He wasn’t a producer or director. If this was a routine pattern of behaviour, and there are several others as Stovall is hinting, why would they all have stayed silent for so long?
What is happening is that a very serious allegation of sexual assault is increasingly being played out in the realm of speculation and celebrity gossip.
Nobody who reads the accusations of Kathryn Mayorga should be in any doubt of their gravity, and how far removed they are from the vacuous images of Kim and Paris that have somehow wormed their way into her story.
The screams; the resistance; Mayorga was hospitalised. The police report describes her as crying and very upset when she
made her complaint. Then there is her letter, the one that was supposed to be read to Ronaldo as part of her agreed financial settlement. ‘I screamed no, no, no, no, no, over and over,’ Mayorga writes.
‘I begged you to stop. I hope you realise what you have done and learned from this terrible mistake. Don’t take another woman’s life as you did mine.
‘I don’t care about your money, that was the last thing I wanted. I wanted justice. There really is no justice in this case.’
Mayorga’s justice — which she says she took on the advice of an inexperienced lawyer, while in a depressed, emotional state — was a £279,000 out-of-court settlement, in return for a non- disclosure agreement saying she would never discuss the case, would delete all electronic evidence around it, and even containing specific instructions on how to behave if asked about it in the street.
That NDAs can be offered around offences as serious as rape is another indication of how far #MeToo, plus very basic human rights issues, have to go.
If an employee leaves a company, an NDA may be appropriate. Disclosing important strategies could be akin to industrial espionage and confidential processes or patents must be protected.
In these cases, the NDA serves to prevent illegal or ethically dubious activity taking place. In Ronaldo’s case, however, the NDA was used to cover up alleged criminal behaviour — albeit subsequently denied. How can that be right? How can it be that wealth is used to silence the downtrodden or wronged — and with law on its side?
One of the first counter- claims from Ronaldo’s lawyers is that Mayorga’s co- operation with
Der Spiegel, the newspaper that broke the story of the alleged attack, the subsequent cover-up and its recent resurrection as a civil lawsuit, is in itself illegal under privacy laws.
They will also assert that the existence of an NDA voids all further claims or legal action, beyond a criminal case brought by the Las Vegas Police Department. While the case has been reopened, the chances of criminal charges being pursued over an offence committed in 2009 remain slim.
The recording of Mayorga’s police interview from the time is believed to have disappeared; as has the underwear and dress she was wearing on the night, that had also been handed to police. This does not make a prosecution impossible, but it does not help.
It could be that Mayorga is left with her civil lawsuit, up against the might of an NDA.
They are powerful things and much beloved by the powerful. To void the NDA, Mayorga will have to prove that she was mentally and emotionally incapable of entering into binding agreements at the time, and that her lawyer was incompetent.
She will have to show she was placed under unreasonable duress, or that Ronaldo failed to uphold his end of the agreement.
Against this, Ronaldo’s team will argue that the engagement of a legal professional is, in itself, a sign of competence and it isn’t his fault if Mayorga now feels poorly represented. Everything was explained at the time and if Mayorga has a case it is against her hapless lawyer.
If there is evidence of Mayorga successfully holding down a job, for instance, it will almost certainly be held up as an example of her making competent decisions at the time and used against her.
Equally, courts are reluctant to go against NDAs because they are a means of hastening process. If they could be easily overturned, fewer would be offered and more cases would end up in already overflowing courtrooms. By the same token, if one party later feels sold short or aggrieved by the settlement, that alone does not make it wrong. Many deals end in regrets. One side traditionally feels they got the best of it, the other the worst. You may feel you overpaid for your house, or a second-hand car. You may believe that antiques dealer knew what your grandmother’s watch was really worth when you sold it for a pittance.
The problem with the NDA that Mayorga signed is that there is considerably more chance of the wealthier, more powerful individual, who can afford the better lawyers and negotiators, coming out of it well.
Mayorga, vulnerable and with a legal adviser quite possibly out of her depth, was always a probable second best against a man able to afford the best legal and reputational representation.
It is these very people who are accused of placing Mayorga under duress; the very people whose goal is to secure their famous client an image-preserving NDA.
That this circle is perfectly legal, has precedents in just about every courthouse on the planet and is considered a valuable and worthwhile part of the disputation process makes it no less vicious.
Given what we know about the conduct of some very celebrated men, from Jimmy Savile to Bill Cosby, it is astonishing that in this modern climate NDAs are still permissible in cases of sexual assault; quite astonishing that NDAs were not one of the first injustices to be addressed as the #MeToo anger spread.
The climate remains toxic. There has been talk of a reckoning for football, of this being a turning point, but how can that be when, within days, details of an alleged rape have morphed into gratuitous glamour shots on page one, and headlines that read: ‘ Strictly Gemma could be quizzed on Ron rape case’? and ‘Footie genius netted hatful of strikers…’ It’s like a form of code. We have to pinch ourselves to be reminded that we have got here from a lawsuit filed on September 27 at Clark County District Court, containing 11 claims including battery, abuse of a vulnerable person and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
In an interview last weekend, Rose McGowan, one of Harvey Weinstein’s original accusers, disparaged Hollywood and its Time’s Up anti-harassment movement. ‘It’s a Band-Aid lie to make them feel better,’ she said. ‘I know these people, I know they’re lily-livered, and as long as it looks good on the surface, to them, that’s enough.’
Hollywood is a boy’s club, obviously, but one also thinks of actress Gemma Arterton, writing a short story to radically reimagine her Bond girl character, MI6 agent Strawberry Fields, from Quantum of Solace.
Instead of sleeping with Bond and winding up dead, as happens in the film, she rejects him, being a serious professional. The story is called Woke Bond Woman. Arterton said she wanted to encapsulate her journey from playing a Bond girl to becoming ‘almost a spokesperson for equality’. YET Quantum of Solace came out in 2008. Who didn’t know the depiction of young women in James Bond films was sexist in 2008? ‘Now put your clothes back on and I’ll buy you an ice cream,’ Bond tells skating prodigy Bibi Dahl in For Your Eyes Only — and that was 1981.
And what kind of name is Strawberry Fields? Arterton accepted a role that was descended from such famously woke characters as Chew Mee, Plenty O’Toole and Pussy Galore, she banked the cheque, bathed in the fame — and now, 10 years later, it’s sexist and she’s a ‘spokesperson for equality’.
No wonder McGowan sounds underwhelmed by Hollywood’s take on feminism. It seems to have shifted direction rather rapidly.
Much like our journey through the colourful, glamorous world of alleged rape.
Every time a Las Vegas attorney gives the yellow press or a rolling news channel what it wants, every time we see a tangential Kim Kardashian reference hustling its way into what may yet unfold as a chilling scandal, every time we see the evidence trivialised or stand idly as silence is bought and fail to consider who benefits from the rules, some of our credibility as a society dies.
Whatever happens from here, there is reputational damage, because it will be a long time before anyone can look at the powerfully chiselled figure of Cristiano Ronaldo and not wonder; but it is our reputation at stake, too.
One day, a future generation may look at NDAs, the sexing up of rape stories, the circus and the tawdry glitz of it all and think, as we do of Ronaldo and his little helpers: they did what?