In Bianca Jagger v. Katz Park Avenue, the Appellate Term, First Department reversed the trial court and threw out plaintiff’s bodily injury claims. Plaintiff, the ex-wife of Mick Jagger, sought in excess of $20 million in damages for injuries allegedly sustained as a consequence of water damage and resultant mold growth in her rent-stabilized Park Avenue apartment. The court accepted LCBF’s arguments that, although plaintiff’s experts inspected the apartment on multiple occasions, they never collected reliable evidence that the air in the apartment contained excessive (or hazardous) amounts of mold. The court held: “[n]otably, plaintiff’s environmental expert merely collected indoor air samples on a single day, a showing insufficiently reliable to demonstrate the level of toxicity, if any, in plaintiff’s apartment.” As there was no admissible evidence of any injurious exposure, the court held that plaintiff’s bodily injury claims should have been dismissed. LCBF also argued that plaintiff’s causation expert’s opinions — that mold was capable of, or in fact have caused, plaintiff’s alleged injuries — were inadmissible junk science. Given the court’s findings regarding the lack of a valid evidentiary showing of an injurious exposure, it did not address the medical causation arguments.
LCBF obtains dismissal of multi-million dollar mold claim by Bianca Jagger
