She was ordering drinks for herself and
her girlfriend on the patio bar at the Voodoo
Lounge
in Fort Lauderdale's Himmarshee District. She had barely taken
her first sip, Borda says, when she found herself fighting off a
plump girl in a too-tight green dress, someone she'd never seen
before.
It was about an hour before midnight on
March 6, 2004, and Borda had been in the club for less than ten
minutes when that stranger started a fight, leaving Borda with a
black eye and a knee injury that required surgery. Three years
later, Borda is still fighting. Her adversary now isn't the
stranger who had been pulling out Borda's hair; it's the Voodoo
Lounge.
Borda sued the nightclub in Broward
County Circuit Court on January 31, 2005; the club offered to
pay her $3,000 to settle, but Borda rejected that and went to
trial in September 2005, delving into new legal territory in a
case that could someday have repercussions for every Florida
nightclub. You've heard of the barkeeper's liability for serving
booze to a drunk who ends up causing a fatal car accident? Now
consider the bar owner's liability for a parking lot assault.
Borda, loan officer for a local
mortgage brokerage and a single mom, had left her waterfront
house in Lighthouse Point for a night on the town with a
girlfriend. She and Maritza Rivero Puccio had become fast
friends after meeting at the beach one day.
Borda, 37, and Puccio, 40, say they
settled on the Voodoo because it's classier than other local
clubs. Borda had gone there in October 2003 for the first time
to celebrate her birthday and enjoyed partying in the VIP area.
Voodoo, a popular dance club with
nearly 10,000 square feet of space in which to get down and get
drunk, has rooms that are decorated so distinctively that
they're more like clubs within a club. For example, the VIP
room, called Envy, is done in white. The patio bar, where Borda
was attacked, was recently turned into its own attraction:
"Rodman's Rehab," which is run in partnership with former
basketballer-cum-attention-grabber Dennis Rodman.
But it was still just the patio bar
that Saturday night in 2004, and Latin music was playing when
the stranger knocked Borda to the ground.
"I didn't see her," Borda testified at
trial. "I felt a push. And then I say to her, 'Don't touch me.'
And she pushed me again. Then I said to her: 'What is your
problem?'"
It's loud inside the Voodoo Lounge. A
"state of the art" Theatremax sound system can make it nearly
impossible to communicate unless you are a skilled lip reader,
and even then, the low lights (Voodoo sells it as "ambient")
could be a hindrance. Either way, the chubby woman, whom Borda
says was about five-foot-three, either couldn't hear Borda or
wasn't interested in answering.
"She was in my face, and she was like
cursing at me and moving her arms and stuff," says Borda, who
admits she pushed the woman back to defend herself.
The shoving caught the attention of
several bouncers, who pulled the women apart. Borda says that
she told one of them the woman attacked her and that she had
never seen her before. According to Borda, the bouncer told her
she could stay and not to worry, because security was kicking
the assailant out of the club for the night. So Borda and her
friend ordered more drinks. One sip into her Baybreeze, Borda
says, she saw a flash of that green dress followed by a fist
coming at her face.
Whomp. Borda was bleeding. Both
she and the woman were pushing each other, yelling, and pulling
hair. A second person was hitting Borda from behind, she says.
Soon Borda fell to the ground. Bouncers arrived as two women
were beating her on the back.
This time, security carried both women
out of the club and put them on the sidewalk. Borda was
bleeding. The black mini-skirt and lacy cream-colored top she'd
bought to wear out that night were ripped. She says she asked a
police officer who was working the door at Voodoo to walk her to
her car. But he and another bouncer refused, Borda testified,
even though the woman who had just attacked her was only a few
feet away. (A Fort Lauderdale Police Department spokeswoman was
not able to identify that officer.)
Borda and her pal, Puccio, said they
walked to the car, which was parked in a lot that borders
Broward Boulevard, but the woman in the green dress (who has
never been identified), her girlfriend, and a man were waiting.
The two women, Borda testified, pounced on her, and while she
was fighting them off, the man kicked her in the left knee
repeatedly.
Jurors heard Borda's story at the trial
two years ago. They awarded her $150,000 to compensate her for
her medical expenses, lost wages, and pain and suffering. Two
months after the verdict, Broward County Circuit Court Judge
Leroy H. Moe knocked that award down to $10,000, saying that
Borda's more serious injuries were sustained in the parking lot
after club bouncers kicked the two antagonists out of the bar.
According to Moe, the Voodoo Lounge was not responsible for what
happened to Borda while she was not in the club.
Borda challenged Moe's ruling in the
Fourth District Court of Appeal, and on February 28, she learned
she'd won. A panel of three judges on the appeals court sent the
case back to Moe and ordered him to reinstate the jury's
$150,000 award. What happened to Borda that night has also
created new case law and narrowly expanded the responsibilities
of businesses to protect their customers from "foreseeable"
risks, a change that essentially requires a common-sense
approach to safety standards.
"The jury reasonably found that the
Lounge's actions in placing Borda along with her assailant
together outside, and the Lounge's employee's inaction in the
face of Borda's request for help were the proximate cause of
Borda's injuries," the appellate judges wrote. Borda declined to
comment for this article, as did her attorney.
Of course, this case isn't out of the
oven yet. Voodoo Lounge owner James Cordaro has already
testified that he doesn't believe Borda even got into a fight at
his club because nobody saw anything that night. Voodoo Attorney
James Facciolo has asked the appeals court to reconsider its
ruling.
