A grinning Lawrence Taylor whipped out a cigar Friday after a jury sacked a teenage hooker’s civil suit against the disgraced Giants great.
The brand of cigar? El Titan De Bronze Redemption.
Taylor began celebrating after a jury took just 50 minutes to dispense with Cristine Fierro’s claims that the ex-linebacker forced himself on her during a “date.”
While the Hall of Famer gave his lawyer Arthur Aidala a bear hug, Fierro cried on her lawyer’s shoulder.
Outside the federal courtroom, Taylor insisted he’d learned his lesson — a turnaround from the day before he said he’d continue paying hookers for sex.
“It’s a different world, you have to govern yourself accordingly,” he said.
Taylor also expressed sympathy for Fierro, who was just 16 when their paths crossed two years ago in a Rockland County hotel room.
“I feel for what she has gone through,” he said. “At that time, if she had said something, I would have helped her. I wasn’t a bad person. I hope she gets her life together. I hope the best for her.”
Asked what he planned to do, Taylor said, “This is a time for me to concentrate now on mending my own broken life.”
He had testified that his lucrative speaking engagements and endorsement deals dried up since his arrest two years ago.
Fierro fled the courtroom after the jury ruled and could not be reached immediately for comment.
One juror, a 43-year-old Westchester man who declined to give his name, said they “felt terrible for her.”
But, he said, they believed the sex was consensual and that Fierro was victimized more by her pimp, Rasheed Davis, who beat her and forced her to go to Taylor’s room.
“She may have shell-shocked, but none of us believed that Mr. Taylor should have been aware of what transpired,” the juror said.
In the 2010 criminal case against Taylor, the ex-linebacker pleaded guilty to patronizing a prostitute and having sex with a minor. He was put on probation for six years.
Taylor’s attorney noted that his client was hit with lowest level sex offender status because officials did not believe there was any violence in the hotel room.
A short time later, Fierro filed a civil suit in federal court seeking unspecified damages on the grounds of battery and gender-motivated violence.
Fierro insisted she had not consented to sex with Taylor and that he should have been able to tell from her swollen eye that Davis had forced her to sell her body to the football great for $300.
In graphic detail, Fierro described the X-rated encounter with Taylor at the Holiday Inn in Montebello, N.Y.
“He took a terrorized 16-year-old girl and used her like a piece of meat,” Fierro’s lawyer, Mariann Wang, said.
Aidala said Fierro was no innocent. He said she dropped out of high school at age 14, worked as a pole dancer at strip clubs, and ran around town with a bottle of Hennessey cognac in her purse.
“There are 16-year-olds, and there are 16-year-olds,” he said.
