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“I don’t know much about it, I’ll be honest with you. My son hadn’t had permission to go on the yacht, but that doesn’t matter. It’s just that I had no idea what went on. I talked to him and he says it’s all nonsense,” said Ron Joyce.

“Everything I’ve heard so far is an accusation of a young person who was likely making allegations that are unfounded.”

Ms. Kelly, 50, had been in an on-and-off relationship with Steven Joyce, 48, for three or four years before the alleged incident; she first met him when a friend was dating his father, she said.

“We really cared about one another,” she said in an interview. They began a romantic relationship after he separated from his wife, said Ms. Kelly, has also been previously married, three times.

To celebrate her 50th birthday, she and a girlfriend traveled to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Oct. 24, 2014, and Steven Joyce collected them at the airport. They had planned to stay together at the Ritz Carlton hotel, her claim states.

They went directly to the family’s yacht, bought for more than $30 million in 2008, which was docked at the Bahia Mar Yachting Center. She had been a guest on the yacht a few times before, she said.

At about 4 p.m., she and Steven Joyce went to a stateroom (private living quarters on a ship) and had consensual sex, she said.

‘They are just allegations. It’s unfortunate. We were friends for a long time’

At dinnertime, her girlfriend came to ask about their plans. Steven Joyce invited her to join him and Ms. Kelly in bed, the suit claims. The female guest declined and he “grabbed her arm and tried to pull her onto the bed with them,” the lawsuit claims.