On the last Saturday in November, Cristiano Ronaldo took the field with a streak of red lipstick smeared across his cheek. This was no fashion statement. The Portuguese soccer star, who joined the Italian juggernaut Juventus on a $340 million deal in July, was lending his international celebrity to a league-wide campaign to curb domestic violence.



The gesture earned Ronaldo easy praise in Italy. After the game, the newspaper Tuttosport ran a front-page photograph of his face, the caption alluding to the campaign’s motto: “A red card to violence.” What the newspaper failed to mention was that two months earlier, Ronaldo had been accused of rape.

In late September, an American woman named Kathryn Mayorga told the German magazine Der Spiegel that Ronaldo had anally raped her during a 2009 party in a Las Vegas hotel room. After the assault, she explained, she had accepted hush money from him and tried to move on with her life. But this year, inspired by the #MeToo movement, she decided to speak out. The Las Vegas police department has reopened its investigation into the allegation, which Ronaldo has repeatedly denied.

Unlike so many other high-profile men accused of sexual misconduct over the past year, however, Ronaldo has faced little backlash from soccer fans, corporate sponsors, the media, or the general public. Mayorga’s allegation “really has not made the kind of stir that you would think it would,” said Elizabeth Farren, one of the lead organizers of the Women’s March movement in Rome. “There hasn’t been a whole lot said about it. It kind of came out and then disappeared.” That’s true not only in Italy, but around the world. “Honestly, I haven’t heard anybody talk about it here at all,” said Jack Bell, a veteran journalist who used to cover soccer for The New York Times. “People want to avert their eyes and perhaps take the approach, ‘Let’s wait to see what transpires.’”

In the era of #MeToo, as allegations of sexual misconduct have toppled one powerful man after another, Ronaldo presents a striking counterexample. Is that because of the particular circumstances of his case? Is it because of gender dynamics in Italy? Or is the psychology of sports fans to blame? Whatever the answer, one thing seems certain: Even as the #MeToo movement has grown in the U.S. and abroad, the Ronaldo case illustrates its limits.