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    PGA Tour and LIV Golf Seek to Drop Litigation Against Each Other

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    Although the tour’s deal with the Saudi wealth fund has not closed, the request to a federal judge was a milestone in golf’s surprise détente.The PGA Tour, LIV Golf and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund asked a federal judge in California on Friday to dismiss the litigation that catapulted golf’s economic and power structure into the American court system.The request to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning that it cannot be refiled, came less than two weeks after the tour and the wealth fund, which bankrolled LIV, announced a tentative agreement to form a partnership. Although the deal may not close for months and faces mounting scrutiny in Washington, Friday’s submission in Federal District Court in San Jose, Calif., was a milestone in the abrupt détente between the rival circuits.Judge Beth Labson Freeman, who has been overseeing the case, is expected to approve the request, a cornerstone of the tentative agreement between the tour and the wealth fund. By abandoning the litigation, LIV, the PGA Tour and the wealth fund are limiting the potential for damaging revelations and surging legal bills, as well as closing off one avenue for recourse if the new alliance falls apart.Justice Department officials, who were already conducting an antitrust inquiry into men’s professional golf, are expected to review the deal closely and could even try to block it or compel changes to it. At least two Senate panels are demanding information about the planned transaction and its consequences, and the deal has not even secured the approval of the PGA Tour’s board.Much about the agreement itself also remains in flux, including the valuations of the assets of the tour, LIV and the DP World Tour, formerly the European Tour, that are to be housed inside the new for-profit venture. The tour’s commissioner, Jay Monahan, is expected to serve as the company’s chief executive, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund’s governor, is poised to be its chairman. The PGA Tour expects to hold a majority of the seats on the new company’s board, but the wealth fund will have extensive power over how it is bankrolled, assuring the Saudis of significant influence.Until June 6, when the deal was announced, the PGA Tour had warned against allowing Saudi money and influence to take hold in golf, fueling California litigation that had a costly, complicated life.The acrimonious proceedings began last August, when 11 LIV players, including the major tournament champions Phil Mickelson and Bryson DeChambeau, brought a lawsuit that accused the tour of violating antitrust laws. LIV itself joined the case later that month.The tour also pursued its own claims against LIV, which it said had improperly interfered with existing contracts with players. The tour later received Judge Freeman’s approval to expand its case to include the wealth fund itself and al-Rumayyan, just one of the rulings that placed pressure on the Saudis and their allies, whose superior financial resources put the tour under immense strain.The tour, the wealth fund and LIV waged a ferocious battle over evidence collection in the case, and many filings in the case were redacted, but a federal magistrate judge concluded this year that the wealth fund was “the moving force behind the founding, funding, oversight and operation of LIV,” undercutting its contention that it was a passive investor in golf.A trial had not been expected until at least next year.Hours before Friday’s filing from the tour and LIV, The New York Times filed a motion that asked the court to unseal records in the case. The Times cited a “substantial and legitimate public interest in these proceedings and their outcome” and suggested that the planned partnership could make concerns of competitive harm moot.“To the extent that competitive harm existed at the time of sealing, those justifications may not apply with the same force today — or upon completion of the parties’ anticipated merger,” The Times’s filing said. “Sealing is a decision that can and should be revisited as facts change and circumstances require.”It was not clear when the judge would rule on either of Friday’s motions. More

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      Judge Rules for Tiger Woods in Dispute With Ex-Girlfriend Erica Herman

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      The dispute in a Florida court focused on whether Erica Herman’s claims against the golf star could be heard publicly or only through arbitration.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, 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., backed Woods’s request to order the matter into arbitration and said Herman had not provided “factual specificity for any claim relating to sexual assault or sexual harassment.”The judge also rejected Herman’s request for a hearing to consider what her lawyers had described as “a factual dispute about the alleged formation of the arbitration agreement” since she did not recall signing it. In her decision on Wednesday, Metzger said the agreement “appears on its face to be valid” and that there was “no substantial issue of fact regarding the making or existence” of the pact.Although the ruling, barring a successful appeal, will take the dispute out of public view, lawyers for Herman and Woods used court filings in the months leading up to the hearing to exchange sensational allegations and slights.In Herman’s account, she went to work in Woods’s constellation of business interests in 2014 and became romantically involved with him in 2015. By the end of 2016, she said in a court filing, she had moved into a home with Woods.About six years later, in October 2022, their relationship collapsed. According to Herman, she was told she and Woods would be taking a quick trip to the Bahamas aboard a private plane and went to an airport with him.“But instead of boarding the plane, Mr. Woods told Ms. Herman to talk to his lawyer, and Mr. Woods left,” Herman’s lawyers wrote in a submission to the judge. “Then, Mr. Woods’s California lawyer, out of the blue, told her that she was not going anywhere, would never see Mr. Woods again, had been locked out of the house, and could not return.”According to Herman, she and Woods had an 11-year “oral tenancy” deal, which had about five years remaining at the time of their breakup. In a filing last autumn, Herman’s lawyers estimated that she had suffered more than $30 million in damages.But Woods’s representatives argued that the aftermath of the breakup, including any matters about Herman’s access to the home in a wealthy enclave north of West Palm Beach, should be handled in arbitration. They cited a three-page agreement dated Aug. 9, 2017, the same day a prosecutor said Woods had reached a plea deal in a case that began with a charge of driving under the influence.The immediate legal question before Metzger was not whether Herman’s interpretation of her tenancy arrangement with Woods was correct, but whether her court was the right forum for the matter to be considered.Woods and Herman became romantically involved in 2015 and broke up in October 2022.Rob Prezioso/EPA, via ShutterstockTo fortify their effort to move the dispute into a Florida courtroom, Herman’s lawyers, relying on a largely untested federal law regarding N.D.A.s, argued that Woods had engaged in sexual harassment because the agreement was tied to his personal and working relationships with Herman.“A boss imposing different work conditions on his employee because of their sexual relationship is sexual harassment,” Herman’s lawyers wrote. Beyond the employer-employee relationship, they said, the push by a Woods-established trust to force Herman from the home the couple had shared also amounted to sexual harassment because “the landlord made the availability of her housing conditional on her having a sexual relationship with a co-tenant.”In a filing of their own, Woods’s lawyers depicted Herman as “a jilted ex-girlfriend who wants to publicly litigate specious claims in court, rather than honor her commitment to arbitrate disputes in a confidential arbitration proceeding.”They also denied that she was “a victim of sexual assault or abuse” and warned the court against allowing “Ms. Herman to end-run her obligation to arbitrate her disputes with Mr. Woods with implausible claims of sexual harassment.” Arbitration tangle aside, the trust, citing the length of the oral tenancy arrangement, said in a separate submission that it believed the housing agreement was not governed by a particular Florida law.Woods has played two tournaments this year, most recently the Masters Tournament in April. He withdrew 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 limited after he sustained major leg injuries in a car wreck in February 2021.Mike Ives More