FanHouse DavidCornwell

Attorney David Cornwell released a statement on Tuesday requesting the accuser to drop her sexual assault civil lawsuit against Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger. In a statement entitled "Andrea McNulty's Own Words Prove She was Not Raped By Ben Roethlisberger," Cornwell contends that McNulty's online behavior is inconsistent with someone who had been sexually assaulted. (Via the Reno-Gazette Journal, a pdf of the statement can be found here.)

The statement includes various e-mails and online chats that McNulty was said to have had with "Ben Millikan" aka "Ben the Soldier" the online persona that Roethlisberger's lawyers believe was McNulty's fictious online soldier boyfriend. I'm an attorney with a background in both civil and criminal law, so I hope to sort out what some of this means for you.

Andrea McNulty's civil lawsuit against Ben Roethlisberger has been verified by ProFootballTalk.com's Mike Florio via a certified copy of the complaint from the courthouse. And just as JJ Cooper mentioned this morning, there is absolutely NO wiggle room between the stories of the two respective parties.

That shouldn't be a huge surprise, per se -- generally speaking, sexual assault cases (even if they're only civil in nature) are more or less diametrically opposed, but after reading the recap of what allegedly went down in Roethlisberger's hotel room, let's just say that this case has the potential to get extremely ugly. (Please note: some of the specific excerpts that follow are extremely graphic in nature.)

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David Cornwell, a lawyer who has represented several NFL players and was a finalist for the job as head of the players' union, is urging the NFL to withhold credentials from the Sports Illustrated web site over its reporting on confidential drug test results.