What did the 2019 Clark County district attorney review conclude about evidence in the Ronaldo–Mayorga investigation?

1. Background of the 2019 review and what was reopened

Las Vegas police reopened an investigation in 2018 after Kathryn Mayorga filed a civil suit alleging a 2009 sexual assault, and the reopened probe produced a prosecution package that was reviewed by Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson’s office in 2019 ^{[1] [4]}. The police inquiry had stretched for months and included routine requests for forensic testing such as DNA from Ronaldo, reflecting the department’s effort to assemble what evidence it could given the decade-old allegations ^[3].

2. The DA’s explicit legal finding: “cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt”

Wolfson’s office announced in July 2019 that, “based upon a review of the information presented at this time, the allegations of sexual assault against Cristiano Ronaldo cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt,” and therefore prosecutors declined to bring criminal charges ^{[2] [5]}. Multiple outlets reported the DA’s conclusion in near-identical terms, underlining that the decision rested on prosecutorial assessment of proof—not on a factual determination that the alleged incident did or did not occur ^{[1] [4] [6]}.

3. The evidentiary obstacles the DA cited

The DA’s statement and contemporaneous reporting stressed two intertwined evidentiary obstacles: Mayorga had initially declined to tell police who the attacker was or where the assault occurred, which hampered the original investigation, and the long passage of time made meaningful fact-finding difficult ^{[7] [3]}. Reporters and legal analysts noted that those gaps limited the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s ability to collect contemporaneous testimony and physical evidence that prosecutors would need to meet the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard ^{[8] [4]}.

4. What the DA’s conclusion did and did not decide legally

The 2019 decision was a prosecutorial charging decision, not a judicial finding of innocence; prosecutors explicitly framed it around the likelihood of conviction—not as a determination that Mayorga’s allegations were false ^{[2] [8]}. That distinction was reiterated across outlets: refusing to charge reflects evaluation of available proof and timing rather than adjudication of the underlying allegation ^{[4] [5]}.

5. How that 2019 conclusion interacted with later civil litigation and reporting

Even after the DA declined to prosecute, Mayorga’s civil claims continued and later court fights produced additional revelations and rulings—most notably a federal judge in 2022 dismissing the civil suit on separate grounds tied to alleged misconduct by Mayorga’s attorney, not the 2019 prosecutorial review ^{[9] [1]}. Coverage of those later developments sometimes conflated the prosecutor’s evidentiary judgment with the federal court’s separate findings, but the 2019 review itself remained focused narrowly on whether criminal charges could be sustained at trial given existing evidence and the passage of time ^{[9] [2]}.

6. Competing narratives and limits of the public record

News organizations uniformly reported the DA’s language that the allegations “could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt,” but outlets also highlighted prosecutorial caveats—this was a judgment about proof, not a definitive factual ruling—and later court actions introduced new factual and procedural disputes that complicate public understanding ^{[1] [9] [6]}. The public record available in news reporting summarizes the DA’s reasoning but does not disclose every investigatory detail the office reviewed, so reporting can only reflect the stated prosecutorial conclusion and the evidentiary points officials cited ^{[2] [3]}.