Image Source: Agencies

A US appeals court was due to hear Wednesday from lawyers trying to revive a woman's bid to force international soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo to pay millions more than the $375,000 he paid her after she claimed he raped her in Las Vegas in 2009.
The woman's attorney is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to overturn the dismissal of the June 2022 lawsuit and reopen a civil lawsuit she filed in Nevada in 2018.
The complaint alleges that a Nevada federal court judge erred by repeatedly rejecting her attempts to unseal and sign evidence of a nondisclosure agreement she signed in 2010 when she accepted payments from Ronaldo.
A three-judge San Francisco-based appeals court is not expected to make an immediate decision after questioning lawyers for Ronaldo and his accuser, Kathryn Mayorga, in a special hearing at the law school on Wednesday. on the University of Nevada campus in Las Vegas.

The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they are victims of sexual assault, but Mayorga agreed to release her name through her attorneys, including Leslie Mark Stovall. Ronaldo is one of the most famous and richest athletes in the world. He manages the national team of his native Portugal and has played for Real Madrid of Spain, Juventus of Italy, Manchester United of England and now plays for Saudi Arabia's professional team Al Nassr.
Las Vegas police reopened a rape investigation after Mayorga filed suit, but Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson decided not to file criminal charges in 2019. He said too much time had passed and the evidence did not show that Mayorga's charge could be proven to a jury .

Mayorga, a former teacher and model from the Las Vegas area, was 25 when she met Ronaldo in a nightclub in 2009 and went to his hotel room with him and others. She claims in a lawsuit filed nearly ten years later that the then 24-year-old soccer star sexually assaulted her in the bedroom.
Through his lawyers, Ronaldo claimed that the sex was consensual. In 2010, they reached a non-disclosure agreement in which Stovall admitted receiving $375,000 from Mayorga.
In dismissing the case last year, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Dorsey in Las Vegas took the unusual step of fining Mayorga's lead attorney, Stovall, $335,000 for acting in bad faith on behalf of his client.
In a March complaint filed on behalf of the mayor, Stovall calls Dorsey's decision a "clear abuse of discretion," and seeks to unseal records and revive the case. He claims that Mayorga was not bound by the non-disclosure agreement because Ronaldo or his associates violated it before the German news magazine Der Spiegel published an article in April 2017 entitled "Cristiano Ronaldo's secret" based on documents obtained in court as a "whistleblower". "Football Leaks" portal.
Ronaldo's lawyers argued -- and the judge agreed -- that the "Football Leaks" documents and confidentiality agreement were the result of privileged attorney-client conversations, had no guarantee of authenticity, and could not be considered evidence.