There was a statement released yesterday, on behalf of @Cristiano #Ronaldo, concerning the rape allegations and our reporting at @derSpiegel. #CR7's lawyer claimed that we quoted manipulated documents in our story. This is our answer. 1/11
We've seen this before. The statement presents the usual path that Mr. Ronaldo and his lawyers have taken in the past when unsuccessfully fighting our investigative work. More details below. 2/11
Our story is carefully researched. We have hundreds of documents from different sources that substantiate our reporting. Here you can see some of them: spiegel.de/sport/fussball… We have no reason to believe that those documents are not authentic. 3/11
Furthermore, as always and before publishing every single article in DER SPIEGEL, we have meticulously fact-checked our information and had it legally reviewed. We are therefore confident with the sources that we base our story upon. We stand by our reporting. 4/11
#CR7’s new lawyer, Mr. Christiansen, writes that some of the documents were “complete fabrications”. This comes 2 weeks after we published! While always denying the rape accusations, this is the 1st time that Ronaldo's side are actually refuting facts of this recent article. 5/11
Doubting our documents seems to be their preferred strategy: When we published an article about the settlement agreement between #Mayorga and #Ronaldo in 2017, his advisors first called it „journalistic fiction“. Now, @Cristiano admits that he agreed to that settlement. 6/11
When we reported about Mr. Ronaldo’s tax fraud, his lawyers first claimed that the information from our documents were “unreliable”. #CR7 denied that he had committed any tax fraud. But by now, he admitted his guilt and paid money back to the Spanish state. 7/11
Before publishing our story about the rape accusations, we gave Mr. Ronaldo and his lawyers the opportunity to respond to the allegations. They could have disputed the facts that we presented to them. They did not do that. 8/11
Instead, they chose to have a media lawyer threaten us. He claimed that we infringed #Ronaldo’s personal rights and announced that he would sue us if we went ahead with publication. So far, we have not received anything in this regard. We will continue to cover the story. 9/11
Here you can read further backgrounds on the research and content of this story: twitter.com/derWinterbach/… This investigation has been a team effort @DerSpiegel from the start and continues like that. Please follow @antjewindmann @derWinterbach @andreasmeyhoff for updates! 11/11
