One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor—an adage that turned into reality for one unfortunate cruise passenger.
A nurse from California successfully sued Carnival Corporation for $300,000, alleging that the cruise line’s bartenders irresponsibly served her excessive tequila, leading to a serious fall and injury. Reports reveal this incident happened aboard a Carnival Radiance ship.
According to the lawsuit shared by the Miami Herald, 45-year-old Diana Sanders was given at least 14 tequila shots within a span of nine hours on January 5, 2024.
The complaint stated that Sanders’ intoxication, a result of being overserved alcohol, led to a severe fall between 11:45 p.m. and 12:20 a.m.
This fall down a staircase inflicted “severe injuries” on Sanders, including a concussion, headaches, injuries to her back and tailbone, bruising, and a possible traumatic brain injury, as noted in the lawsuit.
Her attorney, Spencer Aronfeld, shared in a TikTok video that Sanders awoke at the bottom of a staircase in the crew area, unaware of how she got there, emphasizing the gravity of the situation after the court’s decision.
Sanders’s lawyers argued that bar staff should have cut her off after she became visibly intoxicated, the Herald reported.
“Waking up after blacking out and going to the crew and asking them for help and asking them to tell me what happened was extremely frustrating. They gave me conflicting information, they treated me like a criminal,” Sanders said in the video.
“I felt bullied, I felt like everything they did was to either mentally torment me or financially torment me. It was a lot over the last two years,” she said of the legal process.
Crew members had a reasonable duty of care towards Sanders, including “to supervise and/or assist passengers aboard the vessel who Carnival knew, or should have known, were engaging, or were likely to engage in behavior potentially dangerous to themselves or others aboard the vessel,” according to court documents obtained by the publication.
A Miami federal jury ultimately ruled in Sanders’s favor on Friday, awarding her $300,000 in damages — surpassing the $250,000 requested during the trial, Aronfeld told the Herald.
The verdict found Carnival was 60% at fault for the incident, and Sanders was 40% at fault.
The case marks a rare example of a complaint against a giant cruise line reaching a courtroom and siding with the passenger, the newspaper reported.
“It’s hard to get to trial, period,” Aronfeld said. “I’ve had many overservice cases that have settled, but none that went the full distance.”
Carnival sought to dismiss the lawsuit and argued that Sanders failed to identify a crew member who overserved her or the bar where she consumed the alcohol, so the cruise line could identify the bartenders involved.
“Therefore, the over-service of alcohol count should be dismissed for failure to sufficiently identify a negligent employee,” Carnival’s lawyers had argued, according to the publication.
“Carnival Corporation respectfully disagrees with the verdict and believes there are grounds for a new trial and appeal, which it will pursue,” a spokesperson for the cruise company told the Herald.
The cruiseline did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
