Judge rules in favor of Tiger Woods in secrecy battle with ex-girlfriend

A dispute between golf star Tiger Woods and an ex-girlfriend over her right to live in his home must be resolved through arbitration under a non-disclosure agreement between them, a Florida judge ruled Wednesday.

The ruling set the spectacle on a path to be handled privately — a victory for Woods, whose lawyers had argued that his nondisclosure agreement with Erica Herman, his former companion, broadly required disputes to be handled privately through arbitration, not court proceedings. the legal system.

Herman’s lawyers had questioned the validity of the agreement, in part because they believed some of Woods’s conduct was sexual harassment. Under a relatively new federal law, a nondisclosure agreement related to sexual harassment can be voided, allowing the case to be heard in a court of law.

But in a decision on Wednesday, Judge Elizabeth A. Metzger of the Circuit Court in Martin County, Florida, granted Woods’ requests to withdraw Herman’s claims and force arbitration, saying the claims were “made implausibly “.

Herman, who had worked on the development of the Woods restaurant in Florida, has had the opportunity to “provide factual specificity for any claim involving sexual assault or sexual harassment,” wrote the judge, who was scheduled to hear a hearing on May 9. kept case. at the decision. “But she didn’t.”

While the ruling, barring a successful appeal, will move the dispute out of the public eye, lawyers for Herman and Woods used court documents in the months leading up to the hearing to exchange sensational accusations and scorn.

According to Herman, she started working in Woods’ constellation of business interests in 2014 and got into a relationship with him in 2015. By the end of 2016, she said in a lawsuit, she had moved in with Woods.

About six years later, in October 2022, their relationship collapsed. According to Herman, she was told that she and Woods would take a short trip to the Bahamas aboard a private plane and go to an airport with him.

“But instead of boarding, Mr. Woods told Ms. Herman to talk to his lawyer, and Mr. Woods left,” Herman’s lawyers wrote in a statement to the judge. “Then Mr. Woods’ California attorney told her out of the blue that she wasn’t going anywhere, would never see Mr. Woods again, was locked out, and couldn’t return.”

According to Herman, she and Woods had an 11-year “verbal lease” agreement, which had about five years left at the time of their breakup. In a filing last fall, Herman’s lawyers estimated she suffered more than $30 million in damages.

But Woods’ representatives argued that the aftermath of the breach, including any issues regarding Herman’s access to the home in a wealthy enclave north of West Palm Beach, should be dealt with in arbitration. They cited a three-page agreement dated August 9, 2017, the same day a prosecutor said Woods entered a plea deal in a case that began with a drunk driving charge.

The immediate legal question before Judge Metzger was not whether Herman’s interpretation of her lease with Woods was correct, but whether her court was the proper forum to hear the case.

To bolster their effort to move the dispute to a Florida courtroom, Herman’s lawyers, relying on a largely untested federal law regarding non-disclosure agreements, argued that Woods was guilty of sexual harassment because the agreement was related with his personal and work relationships with Herman.

“A boss who imposes different employment conditions on his employee because of their sexual relationship is sexual harassment,” Herman’s lawyers wrote. Beyond the employer-employee relationship, they said, pressure from a trust set up by Woods to force Herman out of the house the couple had shared also amounted to sexual harassment because “the landlord made the availability of her housing conditional on having of a sexual relationship with a co-tenant.”

In a filing of their own, Woods’ lawyers portrayed Herman as “a spurned ex-girlfriend seeking to publicly litigate misleading claims in court, rather than fulfill her commitment to settle disputes in a confidential arbitration process.”

They also denied that she was “a victim of sexual assault or abuse” and warned the court to “order Ms. Herman to terminate her obligation to arbitrate her disputes with Mr. Woods with implausible claims of sexual harassment. Apart from arbitration, the trust said , citing the length of the verbal lease, in a separate statement that she believed the housing agreement was not governed by any particular Florida law.

Woods has played two tournaments this year, most recently the Masters Tournament in April. He retired during the third round and underwent ankle surgery less than two weeks later. He has not announced when he expects to return to a competition schedule that was already severely restricted after suffering a serious leg injury in a car accident in February 2021.

Mike Ives reporting contributed.