In a victory for the Patriots’ owner, a Florida judge said the videos could not be released until a jury was sworn in or the case was concluded in some way.
Robert K. Kraft won a temporary victory on Tuesday when a Palm Beach County judge ruled that videos from his visits to a massage parlor in Florida would not be released for now.
Judge Leonard Hanser noted the conflict between the public’s right to know and the right of a defendant to a fair trial, but ruled in favor of Mr. Kraft, saying the videos could not be released until a jury was sworn in or the case was concluded in one of several possible ways.
The judge wrote that the incident that is alleged in the massage parlor “seems like a rather tawdry but fairly unremarkable event.” He added: “But if that man is the owner of the most successful franchise in, arguably, the most popular professional sport in the United States, an entirely different dynamic arises, especially if the encounter is captured on videotape and the incident is the focus of much media attention and pretrial publicity.
