SAN DIEGO — NFL punter Matt Araiza has reached a settlement with the attorney representing a woman who had previously accused the former San Diego State player of rape but later dropped him from a civil case targeting several former players.

Araiza said the settlement with attorney Dan Gilleon, who Araiza had accused of malicious prosecution, was reached over the summer. He declined to disclose the details.

“The settlement met my satisfaction, and now I am done with all of the civil lawsuits that I dealt with,” Araiza said Wednesday. He was not charged with a crime and has maintained his innocence throughout. He has long said he wanted to sue Gilleon over his handling of the high-profile case.

Asked for comment, Gilleon did not address the settlement and pointed to the initial legal case. Although Gilleon’s client dropped Araiza from the case last year, it remains in place for four former Aztecs. It is scheduled to go to trial in December.

“This case is about my client, Jane Doe, and the horrific sexual assault she endured in October 2021. The media is free to come watch the trial if it wants to know what happened to her,” Gilleon said in an email Thursday.

Most of the defendants have said any encounter with the woman was consensual. They could not be reached for comment, and it was unclear if any were represented by attorneys.

The settlement Araiza reached with the woman’s attorney caps the legal saga that embroiled Araiza since August 2022, when the woman filed a civil suit alleging he and fellow Aztec teammates had raped her at an off-campus party. She made a police report the Monday after the weekend party, underwent a rape examination and cooperated with the investigation.

San Diego police detectives investigated for nine months and submitted their findings to the county District Attorney’s Office for review. The woman filed her civil suit after police submitted their findings but before prosecutors had decided whether to bring criminal charges. Once the suit was filed in August 2022, the fallout for Araiza was immediate: the Buffalo Bills cut the rookie punter, who they had drafted just months earlier.

In December 2022, five months after the civil suit was filed, prosecutors announced they would not file a criminal case, saying there was no path to conviction.

A year later, in December 2023, the woman agreed to drop Araiza from the civil suit, and Araiza agreed to drop a countersuit he brought accusing her of defamation.

No money changed hands in that settlement. And the agreement left Araiza open to sue the woman’s attorney after a yearlong cooling-off period. It also noted the dismissal of the civil case against Araiza constituted a favorable termination for Araiza — a key element he needed to bring a malicious prosecution claim against her attorneys.

This recent settlement with Gilleon scuttles that potential lawsuit.

Araiza, who signed with the Kansas City Chiefs in February, spoke to the Union-Tribune in a phone call from the Kansas City area Wednesday.

Araiza said he was at “every deposition, every hearing” as he fought the lawsuit brought by the woman. It was important to attend, he said, because his life and reputation were at stake.

“They made claims about me, and instead of me caving to the demands and hiding those from the public, I decided to fight it in plain daylight and let all the facts come out,” Araiza said.

He said the recent settlement sends the message that he “won at every possible turn. If anything that was originally claimed had merit, I wouldn’t have won at every turn,” he said.

The woman said she was intoxicated when she was led into a bedroom and raped by multiple men. Araiza maintained from the start that he was not present during the alleged incident. He does not appear in any of several short cellphone videos of the bedroom encounter with the woman, who was 17 years old and in high school at the time.

Araiza did admit the two had engaged in sex earlier in the evening, in a side yard outside the home. He also said he believed she was 18 years old and a college student. But he said he never entered the home and left the party a half-hour before the alleged bedroom incident.

A prosecutor later told the woman that several of the woman’s friends said that after the side-yard encounter with Araiza, she didn’t appear scared, distraught or obviously intoxicated, and that she was speaking about the encounter as if it was consensual.

At the time of the party, Araiza was a senior whose punting skills would later lead to a national collegiate award and a sixth-round NFL draft pick. The four other defendants were freshmen at the time, and at least two of them were red-shirt freshmen.

After Araiza was cut by the Bills, he was confident he would return to the NFL. “As time moved on and I missed two complete seasons, I would say it was more optimism than confidence,” he said. “I don’t know of many players that spent two years out of the NFL and came back.”

He won the starting punter job with the Chiefs over the summer. The reality that he was back in the NFL hit Sept. 5, when the team played a Thursday night game. He made three punts.

“First time seeing Arrowhead in a regular season game,” he said. “Packed stadium. National television. It was surreal for me and my family.”

He said he has put the matter in San Diego behind him. “I have, honestly,” Araiza said. “I don’t carry anger or resentment with me today. There are times when I get frustrated thinking about the situation but at the end of the day, I’m very happy with life right now.”

The next hearing scheduled in the lawsuit that remains against the four other defendants is a readiness conference set for Nov. 22. The trial is slated to start Dec. 6.

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