TOO HOT, OR TOO NUTS?
Looker’s latest suit has nerve
A WOMAN who claims she was fired for being too attractive is also apparently too sensitive.
Buxom banker Debrahlee Lorenzana, once claimed she was so “curvaceous” that her Citibank” bosses discriminated against her. Now she has quietly filed suit against Quest Diagnostics, charging she suffered “serious and severe permanent injuries” while getting her blood drawn, the Daily News has learned.
Furthermore, because Lorenzana’s lawyer said she isn’t sure exactly how she got the damage to her nervous system, she also sued a driver over a car accident that happened months later.
In papers filed in Queens Supreme Court, Lorenzana, 36, says the needle nightmare happened on July 3, 2012, when she went to a Quest lab in Bayside and was saddled with a nurse who “lacked the requisite skills to draw blood without inflicting harm on her subjects.”
Adding insult to the unusual injury, the pain was in vain, the suit said. The phlebotomist, identified only as “Jane Doe,” and the lab “failed to properly diagnose, treat, [and] prescribe for the condition from which the plaintiff was suffering,” the suit says, and they “failed to properly advise and instruct the plaintiff concerning post-procedure care.”
The suit doesn’t say what her medical condition was and is vague about what injuries she suffered.
It says she suffered “severe shock and damage to her nervous system and certain internal injuries,” and “damaged her psychophysical motor skills,” causing her “to suffer severe physical pain and mental anguish as a result.”
Psychophysics is defined as “the branch of psychology that deals with the relationships between physical stimuli and sensory response.” Lorenzana declined comment.
Her lawyer, Frank Panetta, said the suit is not as unusual as it sounds.
He said the lab tech was struggling to draw blood from his client, and “she got nerve damage. What’s unusual about that? Sometimes they screw up.”
The same lawsuit, filed this past March, also names a Queens driver who rear-ended her in a car accident in Long Island City in December 2012.
Panetta said both defendants were named because Lorenzana developed more severe nerve damage after the car accident, and “we’re not 100% sure which incident caused the injury.”
Lorenzana is hoping for better success with this suit then her notorious Citibank suit.
She filed suit against the banking giant 2010, charging she’d been discriminated against by her male bosses who told her they found her professional business attire “too distracting.”
She was told that “as a result of her tall stature, coupled with her curvaceous figure, she should not wear classic high-heeled business shoes, as this purportedly drew attention to her body in a manner that was upsetting to her easily distracted male managers,” her lawsuit said.
The case eventually went in to arbitration, and Citi said it didn’t pay her any damages.
Lorenzana later went to work for Chase at branches in Brooklyn and Queens.
Public records show she left Chase this summer, and has since relocated to Florida, where she’s working for Wells Fargo.
The new suit seeks unspecified money damages. Lawyers for Quest and the driver, Brian Olenick, did not return calls for comment.