Fresh shots fired in Lewis v club row
More shots have been fired in the lengthy battle between the Hamilton Cosmopolitan Club and its neighbour, adult film actress Lisa Lewis, during a High Court appeal hearing.
Earlier this year Lewis won a civil case against the club and was awarded $10,000 in damages – as well as $47,213 in legal costs – after district court judge David Cameron found the club’s management and patrons had caused ‘‘considerable stress to Ms Lewis over many months’’.
That stress was came from what the judge deemed to be a campaign of bullying against her, which included late night tooting, the erroneous issuing of trespass notices, and the erection of security fences that prevented her from driving in and out of her own driveway – which is only accessible by driving through the club’s car park.
The club, however, has appealed the ruling. In the High
Court in Hamilton yesterday, the organisation’s lawyers Laura Hann and Truc Tran, and Lewis’ counsel Fraser King crossed swords before Justice Timothy Brewer.
Brewer has reserved his decision on the appeal’s outcome. He has much to consider, including whether his district court colleague was successful in sorting fact from fiction, following months of bitter recriminations between the warring parties.
‘‘It’s clear there was, to use an overworked word, a toxic relationship between Ms Lewis and the club,’’ he said.
Led by Hann, the appellants’ case was that there had been both errors of law and errors of fact made by the district court judge when he came to his decision, which was released in early March this year.
One of these was, when Lewis moved into the rental property in 2013, there had been a verbal agreement between her and the club’s then-manager that she could access her home via the car park.
Hann said there had been no such agreement, and it was therefore wrong of Judge Cameron to have taken it into consideration in his deliberations. It was not a case of Lewis being ‘‘landlocked’’ out of accessing her own home, because she still had the grassy accessway to the side of the car park to get there and back, Hann said.
As Judge Cameron noted in his judgment, the grass strip is not wide enough to accommodate a vehicle, and in any event there is a power pole and a power box situated on it.
Another issue was a trespass notice served by the club to Lewis in August 2020. At the time, Lewis had filed with the Disputes Tribunal relating to alleged ‘‘wrongful use of the car park by others’’, and Judge Cameron had deemed it an act of retaliation by the club against her.
This was not correct, said Hann. Rather, the notice had been served in response to Lewis’ repeated harassment of the club’s staff, patrons, and motorhome users who had been permitted to park overnight in the car park.
In his response, King said his client had an email from the former manager, who had told her there were ‘‘no restrictions on your use of the car park area’’ – with the proviso that she be mindful that on busy nights the car park might be full of cars.