Why a rape claim against Ronaldo, perhaps the world’s wealthiest and most famous athlete, is a perfect test case for the #MeToo movement.
When the Italian soccer club Juventus bought superstar Cristiano Ronaldo from Spanish side Real Madrid last summer, the impact of the Portuguese striker’s worldwide popularity was immediately made clear.
Juventus said it sold US$60-million worth of Ronaldo jerseys in the 24 hours after the transfer was announced.
A week earlier, the club’s stock price had jumped by 30 per cent just on the speculation that one of the most decorated players in history would move to its Turin home. Juventus had to explain to Italy’s financial regulators that nothing sketchy was going on. Indeed, in the months since Ronaldo’s move was made official, that stock price has more than doubled.
But it is trending downward. The reason for the dip is entirely unrelated to onfield performance, where Juventus is undefeated across all competitions this season. Ronaldo, the 33-year-old five-time world footballer of the year, has been accused of rape. Specifically, he has been accused of sexually assaulting an American woman, then 25 years old, in a Las Vegas hotel room in the summer of 2009, and then paying her US$375,000 in exchange for her silence in the form of a non-disclosure agreement.
The alleged victim has sued Ronaldo in a Nevada court, seeking monetary damages. Las Vegas police say they have reopened a criminal investigation. Kathryn Mayorga — who went public with her story in a German magazine last weekend — said she ended her silence in part from the waves created by the #MeToo movement, and the ripples that have reached Hollywood, the U.S. Supreme Court and the White House.
Ronaldo responded at first with a grinning post on his Instagram account, calling the story “fake news.” By Wednesday he was much less glib, posting messages that denied the accusations and saying “rape is an abominable crime that goes against everything that I am and believe in.”
So far, the story, which would be blaring-headline news if it involved a superstar athlete playing on this continent, has been more of a side note in the world’s soccer press. Ronaldo’s club and national teams have accepted his denials. On Thursday Juventus touted his “great professionalism” and said, “The events allegedly dating back to almost 10 years ago do not change this opinion, which is shared by anyone who has come into contact with this great champion.” Some of his many corporate sponsors have been far more equivocal, with Nike and EA, the video-game maker, expressing “concern” and vowing to “monitor the situation.” But will that last?
If you were designing a hypothetical case to test how much the public was willing to accept the idea that women should always be believed, the alleged events of this real-world one would be a good starting point. It couldn’t be a better example of the thorny issues of giving credibility to the accuser while allowing due process to the accused had it been grown in a lab. The power imbalance that the #MeToo movement has been credited with upending is plain to see. On one side is not just a famous and wealthy athlete, but possibly the single-most famous and wealthy athlete on the planet. Juventus pays Ronaldo a reported $50 million annually and among his many sponsor contracts is a billion-dollar lifetime deal with Nike. He holds piles of goal-scoring records and has the looks and physique of a model, often on public display when he removes his jersey to celebrate another goal. On the other side is a thenmodel whose job was to hang around outside Vegas clubs with other paid models, with drinks in hand, to encourage patrons to venture inside.
Mayorga’s story, told in unsparing detail to Der Spiegel, is that she met Ronaldo at a nightclub in June 2009, and later went with a friend up to his suite, where after some flirting and a consensual kiss he eventually forced himself upon her over her repeated verbal objections. In the account given to the German magazine, she says she went to local police and sought medical treatment, but refused to identify her assailant. Mayorga said she didn’t want to go public with a criminal or civil case, fearing the backlash, but hired a lawyer who suggested seeking an out-of-court settlement. Months of negotiations, she says, resulted in the US$375,000 payment and a pledge of silence.
And so, to those who believe that accusations of sexual assault against wealthy celebrities are usually motivated by money, they have in this case an example of an alleged victim who did, she says, receive a significant sum, even if it only amounted to a week’s worth of Ronaldo’s wages at the time.
But it’s not hard to imagine that a 25-year-old model would settle for a quiet payoff instead of a protracted legal fight against a global star with vast financial resources. And Mayorga herself has said she feared no one would believe her: why would someone like Ronaldo need to resort to rape? There was also the potential backlash from his supporters. If any part of the culture leans toward reflexive tribalism more than politics, it is sports. But her new lawyers say they have hard evidence to corroborate her version of events, in the form of leaked documents in which Ronaldo acknowledged “she said no and stop several times.”
Those documents, Der Spiegel says, include emails and texts between Ronaldo and his lawyers. The magazine first reported on some of their contents in April 2017, which Ronaldo’s representatives called “journalistic fiction.” His lawyers have never confirmed that any of the documents are authentic, but they also have not taken any legal action against the magazine in the months since it first reported the allegations. (Mayorga refused comment in the 2017 stories and was not identified by name.)
At the least, the existence of documents that purport to show that Ronaldo paid hush money to a rape victim add more to the story than the usual differing versions of events from the alleged victim and would-be assailant. Either they are part of an elaborate scam carried out against a plum target, or they are proof of the existence of another set of rules for the rich, the powerful and the popular.
Ronaldo’s blanket denials could yet be the end of it. The allegations haven’t fundamentally changed since they were first published 18 months ago, and in the meantime Ronaldo won two more Champions League titles with Real Madrid and then made the move to Juventus, which paid a $163-million fee to acquire his rights.
Now, though, his accuser has a name and a face.
Juventus will play on the road at Udinese on Saturday evening. The club will announce its starting lineup that afternoon.