She learned at the feet of a master.
Shakedown artist Al Sharpton’s eldest child wants $5 million from city taxpayers after she fell in the street and sprained her ankle, court records show.
Dominique Sharpton, 28, says she was “severely injured, bruised and wounded” when she stumbled over uneven pavement at the corner of Broome Street and Broadway downtown last year, according to a lawsuit.
Currently on vacation in Bali, the membership director for her gadfly dad’s National Action Network claims she “still suffers and will continue to suffer for some time physical pain and bodily injuries,” according to the suit filed against the city departments of Transportation and Environmental Protection.
“I sprained my ankle real bad lol,” she wrote in a post to Instagram after the Oct. 2 fall.
She was pictured in a walking boot in the weeks following the tumble, but by December, Dominique was good to go for NAN’s Justice for All march in Washington, DC, and for a New Year’s Eve jaunt to Miami Beach.
And despite claiming “permanent physical pain” in a breathless notice of claim, there are social-media shots of her in high heels, and another of her climbing a ladder to decorate a Christmas tree.
The legal shakedown is right out of her dad’s pay-to-playbook.
Al Sharpton has used threats of protests and boycotts against large companies as a way to generate huge corporate donations, his critics charge.
Everyone from McDonald’s, Verizon and Macy’s to General Motors, Chrysler and Pfizer have forked over cash to the elder Sharpton.
The Rev on Saturday said he didn’t know the status of his daughter’s legal claim. “She’s 29 years old. Why would she have to talk to me about that?” he said of Dominique, whose mother is Sharpton’s ex-wife, Kathy. “I just know that she was hurt and that she got a lawyer and she’s a grown woman. [Where] she goes from there, I have no idea.”
Broken sidewalks and rough pavement can be a windfall for pedestrians. One plaintiff, Denise Giles, snagged a cool $2.25 million settlement seven years after suing the city’s Health and Hospitals Corp. for failing to fix a broken sidewalk outside one of its clinics. Giles claimed she needed ankle surgery as a result of her fall.
Her payout was one of 885, or $60 million worth, that the city made over 22 months for defective sidewalks.
Dominique Sharpton claims she fell in a crosswalk, which would make hers a “defective roadway” claim. The city received 774 such claims in the 2014 fiscal year alone.
She was left with “internal and external injuries to the whole body, lower and upper limbs, the full extent of which are unknown, permanent pain and mental anguish,” she alleges.
The younger Sharpton is seeking the damages for “loss of quality of life, future pain and suffering, future medical bills, [and] future diminution of income,” according to court papers.
Sharpton’s lawyer, John Elefterakis, said she had “multiple ligament and tendon tears” and “has not had any involvement in selecting a figure that would be fair and adequate compensation for her pain and suffering. The number was selected by my firm and is meant as a safeguard for Ms. Sharpton in a worst-case scenario.”
If she scores her legal windfall, she might want to give her dad a handout: He reportedly owes $4.5 million in unpaid taxes.
Additional reporting by Kevin Fasick