Lawsuit: Cats Almost Checked Out at Pet-Friendly Hotel

A novelist and her husband are suing a Manhattan hotel for negligence after their cats almost died at the hotel. Marisha Pessl and Nicola Caiano claim that the cleaning staff at the AKA Sutton Place hotel, which says it's "pet-friendly," left out some rat poison--which was eaten by their three cats.

The Post reports Pessl, who wrote Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and Caiano decided to relocate to the AKA SP after their Tribeca apartment was damaged by a fire. Their lawyer Constantine Dimopoulous said the couple is looking for $25,000 in damages after they returned to their room finding their two Maine coons and one ocicat on the floor "practically dead."

Their lawyer, Constantine Dimopoulous, said, "The vets treated [the cats] and, thankfully, did everything they could to save their lives. [But] they've been treated on multiple, multiple occasions since and have been pretty much irreparably harmed." He added that the hotel refused to pay for the cats' medical bills--plus "You don't leave rat poison lying around rooms in a pet-friendly hotel."

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By Jen Chung in News on April 26, 2008 2:00 PM

Comments [rss]

chuzzlewit

omigod its those two main coon cats from the Overlook - they totally freak me out. get on your bigwheel and GO, danny ocicat!!!!

Spirit of 76

Oh, joy. Another bad Photoshop job on Gothamist. They can't spare a minute to copy edit but 15 minutes to slap together a cheesy composite is fine.

$400-550 per night (plus a pet surcharge) and they still have a rat problem? Bunch of incompetent boobs. Give me a thousand bucks and I could put together a rat trap a reincarnated Houdini couldn't escape, and completely safe for people and pets. At that price, though, not much of a market outside luxury buildings.

sonyactivision

Cats suck. That hotel should be fined for using weak and ineffective rat poison.

UnrepentantFenian

I can't stand cats, but if they could get to it so could children. Won't someone please think of the children?!

Yikes, did I just say that?

ironybubble

Perhaps they have a pet-friendly hotel so that they might inexpensively do away with their rodent problem? Guess someone didn't get the memo :-)

That sounds like a pretty reasonable lawsuit though. $25,000.00 of medical expenses I guess eh? Why on earth did the hotel refuse to pay? Someone's gonna get fired!

Kevin Bracken

That is pretty freakin' ridiculous. If you advertise it as a pet friendly hotel, rat poison should be an obvious "don't."

(Come to think of it, they could just use guest's cats to control the vermin problem, hah)