MONTREAL – A civil dispute over the estate of boxer Arturo Gatti has taken a dramatic twist, with the testimony shifting Thursday to the night before he was found dead in a Brazilian resort town.
His widow Amanda Rodrigues told a courtroom that, hours before he died, a drunken Gatti hit her in public and she fell to the ground.
She says the dispute came after an evening at a pizzeria in the small resort town of Porto de Galinhas.
She says Gatti wanted to keep drinking at a local bar after consuming a lot of wine at dinner. Rodrigues said she just wanted to go home with their infant son, asleep in his stroller.
“He didn’t want to go home and he didn’t want me to go home,” she testified.
“He hit me,” she said. “And I fell.”
That’s when the couple parted ways.
Rodrigues said she darted away to a nearby hotel, leaving her son behind with his father. She told the judge: “He didn’t let me take my son.”
She said Brazilian police later told her that Gatti then wound up in a brawl with as many as 20 people in a town square. The crowd had apparently witnessed the couple’s dispute.
Rodrigues says the bloody head wound Gatti received the night he died was apparently unrelated to his death – but actually happened because the angry mob pelted him with a wide variety of objects.
Rodrigues never saw the melee herself. But she said she read in a police report that the crowd “probably threw rocks at him and I heard that they even threw bicycles at him.”
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She said evidence of the bloody brawl was apparent when they later met up at their resort. She said Gatti was holding their infant son, who was crying.
“My son had a bib and on the bib was (Arturo’s) blood,” she said.
Rodrigues said Gatti seemed surprised when he noticed marks on her arms: “He was not angry. He was sad – and when he saw my arms, he asked who did that to my arms.
“And I said, ‘It was you,'” Rodrigues testified. “I told him, ‘You’re never going to change.'”
The next morning, Gatti was found dead.
That’s where the questions stopped as Rodrigues’ lawyer argued that Gatti’s death has nothing to do with their Quebec civil trial over his $3.4 million estate.
Lawyer Pierre-Hugues Fortin is seeking to limit the kind of questions that can be asked surrounding the events of that night in July 2009.
“If he wanted to (ask such questions), he should have announced his intentions earlier,” Fortin said of the opposing lawyer.
“If my colleague wants to allege that my client, Amanda Rodrigues, is responsible for the death of her husband, Arturo Gatti, he should amend his proceedings and do it right now.”
Rodrigues’ lawyer said her testimony in a Montreal courtroom could later be used against her in a wrongful-death case launched in New Jersey by Erika Rivera, the mother of Arturo Gatti’s daughter, Sofia.
But Gatti family lawyer Carmine Mercadante said he wants to know what happened that night because it speaks to Rodrigues’ credibility.
Mercadante says it is his right to ask questions about this final fight between the couple, the same way other disputes between the couple have come up during the trial.
“I’m not alleging anything my lady, I just want to know what happened that night,” Mercadante said.
Justice Claudine Roy is to weigh the arguments and rule Friday morning about whether to allow further questions about that fateful night.
Rodrigues was initially detained as a prime suspect. Brazilian authorities had said she was responsible for her husband’s death and had strangled him with her purse strap as he drunkenly slept.
But the final report of their investigation concluded, after an autopsy, that Gatti had committed suicide by hanging himself with a handbag strap from a staircase in their apartment.
Since then, a report commissioned by Gatti’s long-time manager, Pat Lynch, has pointed to homicide as the cause of death.
Brazilian authorities are taking a second look at the case based on this new report, but have not indicated if it might change their findings.
In the meantime, a pair of documentary shows produced about Gatti’s death are slated to air Friday and Saturday night in Canada and the United States, respectively.
The Gatti family and Rodrigues have been at odds since the boxer’s 2009 death at that Brazilian resort.
The boxer’s family does not accept the conclusion of Brazilian authorities that he committed suicide. And they reject the legitimacy of a will, signed just weeks before his death, that left everything to Rodrigues.
The Gatti family has said their preference is that the fortune be split equally between Gatti’s child with Rodrigues and his child from a previous relationship.
They say they don’t want any of the money for themselves but contend that a 2007 will that leaves everything to Gatti’s mother and daughter from a previous relationship is valid.
They have not been able to produce a signed copy of that will.
There appeared to be some hope of a settlement earlier this week. Lawyers haven’t ruled out a deal but have continued with the trial.
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