Family ties in knots with hotel lawsuit

● A Pretoria woman who is suing a top Western Cape hotel for injuries she sustained during a bath could wind up inadvertently litigating against her parents.

Dominique Jacobs is embroiled in a drawn-out legal battle with the Beacon Island Hotel in Plettenberg Bay over the 2012 incident in which a shower door shattered and cut her, she claims.

She launched the lawsuit in 2014 and it has been interrupted by complex legal twists — including a high court judge using the case as an example of “how litigation should not be conducted”.

She is suing the hotel for R700,000 for the pain she endured and for “past and future loss of earning capacity”.

The hotel denies liability and, in a surprise move, dragged Jacobs’s parents, Juan and Anneke Jacobs, into the skirmish by joining them as parties in the court action.

Juan has time-share use of the hotel, which, it says, binds him “contractually to indemnify the [hotel] against any liability it might incur in respect of the sort of claim brought by [his daughter]”.

Paul Eia, counsel for the hotel, told the court Dominique was her father’s guest at the hotel when the incident happened.

Whether or not Juan was so bound was the subject of an appeal he made to the full bench of the court — which struck the matter off the roll this month and ordered Juan to pay costs in the abortive appeal.

“This matter should never have had to come before [the judge]; even less so before us on appeal. It tells a story of how litigation should not be conducted,” judge Ashley Binns-Ward said.

Juan referred the Sunday Times to his lawyer, Anthony Bachelor, for comment. Bachelor said the decision of the full bench had no bearing on the pending lawsuit and that the delay was “frustrating for all of us”.

The matter is to be heard in October.