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One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor.
A nurse from California successfully sued Carnival Corporation for $300,000 after alleging that their cruise staff overserved her tequila, leading to a fall that resulted in significant injuries, according to reports.
Diana Sanders, aged 45, reported that crew members aboard the Carnival Radiance served her at least 14 tequila shots within a span of less than nine hours on January 5, 2024, as detailed in the lawsuit reviewed by the Miami Herald.
The complaint states, “Due to her inebriated state that was caused by this over-service of alcohol, D.S. suffered a severe fall between 11:45 p.m. and 20 minutes past midnight,” according to the outlet.
This dramatic fall down a staircase left the Northern California nurse with “severe injuries,” including a concussion, persistent headaches, back and tailbone injuries, bruising, and a potential traumatic brain injury, as outlined in the lawsuit.
“She woke up, not knowing exactly how she got there at the bottom of the staircase in the crew area,” her lawyer, Spencer Aronfeld, said in a TikTok video alongside Sanders after the verdict.
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.