MORE MONEY: Cristiano Ronaldo received £280,000 from the rape accuser's attorney after the sex attack charges were rejected.

Leslie Stovall, Kathryn Mayorga's attorney, was required by a US judge to deliver the money to the highest-paid athlete in the world in person.
It follows the former Manchester United, Real Madrid, and Juventus forward's 38-year-old accusation that the lawyer's "reckless conduct" in the protracted lawsuit had prejudiced him.

Police have never filed any charges against the singer because she has consistently denied raping Mayorga, 40, in a hotel room in Las Vegas in 2009. She has maintained that they had consensual sex.

Mayorga asserted that Ronaldo had given her £275,000 in 2010 to silence her about the event and deter her from filing a criminal complaint.

But after Football Leaks revealed specifics of discussions between Ronaldo's lawyers, she eventually filed the civil complaint eight years later, seeking millions more.

Then, in June of last year, US district judge Jennifer Dorsey dismissed that claim on the grounds that the court's request for certain records had been improperly obtained.

In her most recent decision, the court stated that if the plaintiff counsel hadn't acted in bad faith, Ronaldo would not have incurred the majority of the fees and expenses that he incurred in this action.

She also rejected a request from former model Mayorga to have Ronaldo present his legal contract so she could check to see if he had received any fee breaks.

With his use of hacked papers revealing conversations between Ronaldo and his attorneys concerning the rape allegations, Stovall has been accused by the judge of tainting the case "beyond redemption."

The documents, according to Ronaldo and his attorney, were falsified in an effort to malign him.

He was only given more than half of the £506,000 in legal fees he was attempting to recover.

The purloined materials served as the foundation for Mayorga's charges from the beginning, according to the Las Vegas-based court.

"Despite having to acknowledge the case's shaky foundations, Ronaldo must share some of the guilt for it taking as long as it did.

The effort Ronaldo's attorneys did in conducting discovery or getting ready for trial was avoidable, so I decline to award fees for it.

Ronaldo, who was 24 at the time, was vacationing in Las Vegas with his cousin and brother-in-law at the time of the alleged attack.

When she was 25 years old, aspiring model Ms. Mayorga worked at the Palms Casino Resort's Rain nightclub, where she first encountered the celebrity in the club's VIP area.

Ronaldo currently makes a staggering £173 million per year playing for Saudi Arabia's Al Nassr.