FLORIDA – A dispute between golf star Tiger Woods and a former girlfriend about her right to live in his home must be resolved through arbitration under a non-disclosure agreement between them, 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 non-disclosure 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’ conduct was sexual harassment. Under a relatively new federal law, a non-disclosure 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, Florida, granted Woods’ requests to stay Herman’s claims and compel arbitration, saying the claims had been “implausibly pled”.

The judge wrote that Herman could have provided factual specificity for any claim relating to sexual assault or sexual harassment, but “she has not done so”.

In Herman’s account, she went to work in Woods’ 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 was told by his lawyer that she had been locked out of the house and would never see Woods again.

“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’ lawyers depicted Herman as “a jilted ex-girlfriend who wants to publicly litigate specious claims in court, rather than honour her commitment to arbitrate disputes in a confidential arbitration proceeding”. They also denied that she was “a victim of sexual assault or abuse”.

Woods has played two tournaments this year, most recently the Masters in April. He withdrew during the third round and underwent ankle surgery less than two weeks later. He has not announced when he will return to a competition schedule that was already severely limited after he sustained major leg injuries in a car wreck in February 2021. NYTIMES