Lawsuit attempts to block payout of OneOrlando Fund

Officials say it won’t delay disbursements

A paralegal who was hurt running from the Pulse nightclub massacre has asked a judge to order an audit of the OneOrlando Fund, but officials said Tuesday that her lawsuit will not delay disbursements of the charitable money to victims and families.

The lawsuit comes as OneOrlando officials announced that they had also fended off other challenges — including 44 unsubstantiated claims for a share of the money. Officials said the claims were rejected largely because the FBI could find no evidence that the people filing them were in Pulse nightclub on the night of the massacre.

In addition, nine of the 44 were duplicate applications in which more than one person tried to claim the right to a payout for one of the 49 club-goers killed.

“You’re undoubtedly going to have some unhappy people,” said Camille Biros, the fund’s deputy administrator. “We decided we would not make any of those claims eligible unless we had that statement from the FBI that they had interviewed [the person] and confirmed that that individual was there.”

Jillian Amador, who filed the suit asking for an audit, was at Pulse with friends on June 12. She initially filed the complaint on Friday in Orange County Circuit Court, but a judge tossed it because the respondents were not served. She refiled the petition Tuesday, seeking an emergency order to stop the payout, but Circuit Judge John E. Jordan again denied the request.

However, the judge did set an Oct. 6 hearing on the lawsuit’s demand for an audit of the OneOrlando Fund.

At a news conference Tuesday, Orlando Magic CEO Alex Martins, chairman of the OneOrlando Fund’s board of directors, said the lawsuit will not delay payments of the $29.5 million, which should be complete by the end of the week.

OneOrlando announced more than two months ago that it would audit the money after it has been distributed, as has become standard procedure. Amador was pushing for an audit beforehand, which Martins said wasn’t practical.

“Quite frankly, if we did an audit today, we wouldn’t be able to audit the distribution — because it hasn’t all been distributed yet,” he said. “We need the entire process to be complete before we can thoroughly give a public audit that will give feedback on every segment of what we did. And we will do that.”

In the 46-page complaint, Amador’s attorney questioned the credibility of fund administrator Ken Feinberg, dubbed the “compensation czar” for his extensive work on victim compensation in mass tragedies. Feinberg, a Washington attorney, previously led the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster Victim Compensation Fund and One Fund Boston.

Amador works at the same firm that filed the lawsuit, Maitland-based Cohen Grossman, Attorneys at Law.

“In short, we simply want to hold the fund and its administrator accountable to their stated mission: to collect and distribute the funds in an open, fair and transparent manner,” Amador’s attorney, Paul Zeniewicz, said in an email. “A pre[disbursement] audit is absolutely necessary to make sure that the fund is distributing 100 percent of the monies collected ... to the victims and victims’ families.”

OneOrlando officials said the lawsuit may well be moot by the time the hearing is held.

Amador, through her attorney, declined an interview request. She previously told the Orlando Sentinel she ran from the club as gunman Omar Mateen opened fire. She was not shot but fell down trying to escape and was trampled and had shards of glass in her arm. The paralegal said she goes to therapy once a week and began physical therapy for her injuries.

Forty-nine people were killed and 68 were wounded in the Pulse attack.

Already, OneOrlando.org has posted on its website certified letters from accountants for each of the organizations that raised money for the fund — OneOrlando, Equality Florida, the GLBT Community Center of Central Florida and the National Center for Victims of Crime — saying that they had examined the bank records to ensure they matched the donations reported.

Correspondence attached to Amador’s lawsuit shows Zeniewicz has been calling for Feinberg’s removal since Aug. 8. Feinberg could not be reached for comment.

Board members of the OneOrlando Fund — created from donations that poured in after the tragedy — had been warned from the outset that there would be fraudulent claims for a share of the money. At least three people were convicted for attempting to defraud the One Fund Boston in the months following the Boston Marathon bombings.

OneOrlando officials said they’ve done everything possible to prevent abuse so far.

There also may be a second, much smaller distribution of the funds down the road, Martins said, if there is money left after this week’s payout. That’s because Feinberg is still waiting on documentation for a handful of claims, and because money is still coming into the fund.

“We will not continue to raise money or ask for any additional donations,” Martins said. “But we still have an inventory of [Orlando United] T-shirts that the [Orlando] sports teams sold during the course of this process — which, by the way, generated hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

On Monday, the board had voted to pay $350,000 to each of the families of the 49 killed; from $35,000 to $300,000 to the wounded, depending on the extent of their injuries; and $25,000 each to those who were present when the shooting began but who escaped physical injury.