A California nurse won a $300,000 lawsuit against Carnival Corporation after claiming bar staff for the cruise giant overserved her tequila — causing her to fall and severely injure herself, according to reports.
Diana Sanders, 45, said she was served at least 14 shots of tequila in less than nine hours while aboard a Carnival Radiance ship on Jan. 5, 2024, according to the lawsuit obtained by the Miami Herald.
“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,” the complaint said, per the outlet.
Her massive tumble down a staircase caused the Northern Californian nurse to suffer “severe injuries,” including a concussion, headaches, back injuries, tailbone injuries, bruising, and a possible traumatic brain injury, the lawsuit added.
“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.
