Cristiano Ronaldo has appeared to dismiss as "fake news" a US woman's claims he raped her in Las Vegas in 2009.
In an Instagram live with followers, the Juventus star said: “No, no, no, no, no. What they said today? Fake, fake news.”
It was not immediately clear to which follower's question he was responding. But on Saturday Germany's Der Spiegel magazine published a 9,000-word report revealing the woman at the centre of the allegations.
“They want to promote [themselves by using] my name. It’s normal,” said Ronaldo. “They want to be famous to say my name, but it is part of the job. I am a happy man and all good.”
Lawyers for the footballer have denied the rape claim and said they would sue Der Spiegel for what they dubbed "one of the most serious violations of personal rights in recent years".
In the report Kathryn Mayorga, a 34-year-old Las Vegas native, claimed she met the player in a Las Vegas nightclub in June 2009.
Later in his hotel penthouse she claims he raped her anally.
He invited her and a friend up to a party, Mayorga claims, and attacked her in a bathroom. First he asked her for a kiss then she alleges he “touched me all over . . . I pushed him away and again said ‘no’.
“When he was finished he still didn’t want to let me go,” she said. “He looked at me, full of guilt, and started calling me ‘baby’. I can’t remember exactly what he said but he said sorry, asking if I had pain. Then he went down on his knees and said: ‘99 per cent of me is a good guy, I just don’t know about the other one per cent.’ ”
Her friend said Mayorga emerged “totally disheveled, her hair was messed up, her make-up smeared”.
In January 2010 the footballer agreed to pay Ms Mayorga a $375,000 settlement. In exchange she agreed to drop charges and not go public.
A new lawyer she has hired has questioned the legality of the out-of-court settlement. He showed the German magazine what he said was an early version of a statement about the night, allegedly from Ronaldo. In it he says: “‘I took her from behind, the rough way . . . she said ‘no’, and ‘don’t do that’ several times. Afterwards I apologised.”
The woman's lawyer claims these admissions vanished from later versions of the statement. Der Spiegel first reported on the allegations last year, without identifying the woman, and were threatened with legal action from Ronaldo's lawyers for publishing "journalistic fiction".
No legal action has emerged to date, although his German lawyer Christian Schertz now claims he will act against the German magazine's "blatantly illegal" reporting.
“It violates the personal rights of our client Cristiano Ronaldo in an exceptionally serious way,” the lawyer said in a statement. “This is an inadmissible reporting of suspicions in the area of privacy. It would therefore already be unlawful to reproduce this reporting.”
