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A Florida judge on Wednesday issued a temporary protection order barring the release of video evidence of sexual services that Robert Kraft would have received from a massage parlor.
Kraft's legal team tried to prevent the release of the statement after the Palm Beach County Attorney General's office on Wednesday morning surprised the New England Patriots and other defendants by announcing that they would publish the video as soon as possible, claiming that Florida's extensive laws regarding open archives option.
Judge Joseph Marx scheduled a hearing on April 29 to rule on the video evidence.
Kraft and 24 other men were charged with prostitution in February, after the police identified them as having received services at the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Florida. Part of the evidence gathered against the men, as well as two women running the spa, was a video surveillance installed by the police.
Kraft and other defendants filed motions for the video evidence to be sealed and removed last month, and a hearing was scheduled for April 26. But Attorney General Dave Aronberg has announced his intention to release evidence Wednesday morning as part of the case. two women, Hua Zhang and Lei Wang, not in the cases against Kraft and other men.
Kraft, which is fighting two counts of misdemeanor with a particularly large legal team, responded by filing a motion to intervene in the lawsuits against Zhang and Wang. The Kraft team argues that the broadcast of the video is of no public interest and that no action should be taken until a judge has the opportunity to rule on their request to seal or to delete the evidence.
Last month, prosecutors offered him and the other defendants a diversion agreement allowing them to have the cases closed and the evidence sealed if they accepted certain conditions, including an admission that they would have lost if they had been judged. But Kraft refused to admit that he had committed a crime and instead set up an expensive legal defense that surprised prosecutors and some members of his entourage.
A group of media companies, including ESPN, intervened in the case, filing a lawsuit for the publication of all documents, including video evidence. Prosecutors said in the court documents that nothing in Kraft's case allowed them to conceal evidence from the public. The material may be obscene, but that's not a reason to exempt it from publication, they argued. The filing also noted that, in practice, the state rasterizes or blurs the sexually graphic content.
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