‘Damage control’
Shady loan firm hires Lizzie Grubman
An embattled Brooklyn finance firm with ties to “The Real Housewives of New York City” hired disgraced p.r. princess Lizzie Grubman for damage control” after The Post published an exposé this week.
Grubman, who once represented such clients as Jay-Z and Britney Spears, achieved infamy in July 2001, when she injured 16 people by plowing a Mercedes SUV — in reverse — into a crowd of clubgoers outside the Conscience Point Inn in Southampton.
Grubman told The Post she was hired by LawCash because she met CEO Dennis Shields, ex-boyfriend of “Real Housewife” Bethenny Frankel, through fellow castmate Carole Radziwill, a Grubman client.
Frankel and Shields stopped dating at the end of this past summer, a source close to Frankel told The Post.
Grubman, 46, said, “I represent Carole from ‘Housewives.’ I was her manager. I met [Shields] through that, and that’s how it all started.
“My new thing is damage control. I got bored of p.r. How’s that?”
But she then promptly sent a female reporter a typo-ridden, nearly incoherent e-mail — addressed to a mystery man named “Henry.”
“Hi Henry!” she wrote. “Attached please find 4 course that I hope that you further explain explain Law Cash. Please call me on my cell for additional information information.”
Grubman was sentenced to 60 days in jail for leaving the scene of an accident and criminally negligent assault in the 2001 incident. She claimed she was sober, and a DWI charge was dropped because cops didn’t test her blood-alcohol level.
Earlier this week, The Post revealed that LawCash — which fronts money to people against potential legal settlements — was part of an industry that’s costing taxpayers millions of dollars a year by fueling litigation against the city.
Grubman’s e-mail disputed information in case files reviewed by The Post that showed two LawCash clients who received advances of $350 and $500 paid back the firm $4,200 and $2,600, respectively.
Grubman said they actually received multiple installments totaling $3,000 and $2,000, paying back $4,169 and $2,610, respectively.
LawCash also wrote off $800 advanced to one of the men against a suit that he lost, Grubman said.
We asked Thursday if New York politicians will finally stand up to the legal shark industry that’s been bleeding taxpayers by exploiting City Hall’s eagerness to settle lawsuits. One reason they’ve been AWOL is now clear.
As The Post reports, those lawyers — who encourage questionable lawsuits by handing out quick cash advances to potential plaintiffs — have been spreading their largesse all over Albany. And reaping the lion’s share is Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
Execs at one of the largest such firms, Brooklyn-based LawCash, have lavished $145,000 in donations to state pols, with the AG getting $39,000. Schneiderman has never taken action against LawCash — though last year he did sue one of its rivals for similar practices.
Besides the direct donations, a lobbying group co-founded by LawCash’s president has spent $304,380 — more than half since 2016, when a bill to regulate “third party liti- gation financing” passed the state Senate but died in the (always trial-lawyer-friendly) Assembly.
Firms like LawCash offer up-front cash to prospective plaintiffs, then cash in by collecting a hefty “repayment” at loan-shark rates, far above the legal limit on loan-repayment rates. (They dodge the law by not requiring losing plaintiffs to repay, so the advance technically isn’t a loan.)
Everyone seems to come out ahead except the taxpayers, because the practice promotes dubious cases that otherwise never would’ve been filed. Not helping is the city’s eagerness to offer settlements, especially in cases against cops and correction officers.
Of the whopping $722 million City Hall paid out last year on civil claims, more than half came from settlements.
That cash fuels the sharks’ gifts to Schneiderman and other pols — who, natch, use the funds to polish their claims to be principled idealists.