Judge Rules for Tiger Woods in Secrecy Battle With Former Girlfriend
A dispute between the golf star Tiger Woods and a former girlfriend about her right to live in his home must be resolved through arbitration under a nondisclosure agreement between them, a Florida judge ruled on Wednesday.
The ruling put the spectacle on a path to be handled in private — a victory for Woods, whose lawyers had contended that his nondisclosure agreement with Erica Herman, his former companion, broadly required disputes to be addressed privately through arbitration, not the court system.
Lawyers for Herman had cast doubt on the validity of the agreement, in part because they believed that some of Woods’s conduct was sexual harassment. Under a relatively new federal law, a nondisclosure agreement connected to sexual harassment can be declared void, allowing the matter to be heard in a court.
But in a decision on Wednesday, Judge Elizabeth A. Metzger of the Circuit Court in Martin County, Fla., granted Woods’s requests to stay Herman’s claims and compel arbitration, saying the claims had been “implausibly pled.”
Source: The New York Times
