Phanatic sued by Abington woman over alleged pool horseplay
He's big, green and usually just a little goofy, but an Abington woman claims the Phillie Phanatic turned into the Incredible Hulk at the Jersey Shore when he tossed her in a hotel pool.
Suzanne Peirce claims she was attending her sister's wedding at The Golden Inn in Avalon on July 17, 2010 and was poolside with the Phanatic, who was "engaging in various antics" during a comic routine, according to a lawsuit filed last week in Common Pleas Court and first reported by Courthouse News,
The Phanatic suddenly picked up both Peirce and her lounge chair and tossed both into the pool, according to the suit.
Peirce claims she hurt just about everything in the incident, including suffering "severe and permanent injuries to her head, neck, back, body, arms and legs, bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, nerves and tissues ..." and more. The pool did have water in it, attorney Aaron Denker said, though Peirce was tossed in the shallow end.
"The next day she really felt it and had a difficult time getting out bed and had a difficult time participating in the wedding," Denker said.
Since it was unclear who was actually in the Phanatic costume that day, Peirce is suing both Tom Burgoyne and Matt Mehler or any other unnamed individual who was portraying the Galápagos Islands native there, the complaint claims. The team and The Golden Inn are also named as defendants.
A Phillies spokeswoman said the team was aware of the lawsuit and declined to comment while a representative from The Golden Inn did not immediately return requests for comment.
Denker said the Phanatic was not a part of this particular wedding, though pictures on The Golden Inn's website show him posing with unnamed newlyweds. There's also a YouTube video of the Phanatic at the pool there, dancing with some women and playing in the sand with a kid.
The lawsuit does not mention specific dollar amounts, but claims Peirce has spent large sums of money on medicine and medical attention and has also suffered from "humiliation and loss of life's pleasures. “
Peirce, Denker said, is a Phillies fan.
This isn't the first time the Phanatic's been accused of being too fanatical: in 2010 the Daily News found he'd been sued at least three other times in the last decade, once for hugging someone too hard. In 2010, a woman attending a Reading Phillies game with her church group claimed he sat on her legs, making her arthritis act up and ultimately led to a knee replacement, a lawsuit alleged.
He's not the only mascot to get into legal trouble, though. In 2010, an Upper Darby woman sued Disney, claiming a Donald Duck mascot touched her breast, causing a “shock to her entire nervous system" along with flashbacks and digestive problems.
However, the man inside the costume resigned after he was accused of touching three women
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