It’s barroom mating rituals of the young, rich and drunk — gone horribly awry.
A scrawny Manhattan corporate attorney is suing a brunette marketing executive for rejecting his romantic overtures in a big way: by smashing a champagne flute in his face and then using a glass shard to slice him up so violently that he now can’t move his right eyebrow.
The Lower East Side bar brawl between strangers Victoria Grossman, who lives in a $1 million townhouse in Westchester, and Barry Klarberg, son of manager-to-the stars Barry Klarberg, is now playing out in Manhattan’s civil and criminal courthouses, where their attorneys are brawling verbally, calling each other’s clients names including “wild animal” and “little snot-nose.”
“It was an uneventful night until the drunk Ms. Grossman bumped into him and acted like an unrestrained wild animal,” Klarberg’s lawyer, Stuart Slotnik, huffed to The Post after slapping Grossman with a lawsuit Wednesday.
“He is an entitled little snot-nose who should learn some manners,” countered criminal defense lawyer Daniel Ollen after winning Grossman a no-jail deal on assault earlier Wednesday, over prosecution objections.
The two privileged but obnoxious 20-somethings fell passionately in hate in January, after Klarberg made the moves on Grossman as they drank at the Hotel Chantelle on Ludlow Street.
“He says, ‘Will you sleep with me?’ — that was the gist of it,” said Grossman’s lawyer. “And she says, ‘I’m not like that.’ Then he says, ‘You don’t know who I am,’ and she says, ‘I don’t care who you are.’”
That’s when Klarberg — whose dad owns a stake in the Yankees and reps Justin Timberlake, Charlie Sheen and Anna Kournikova — allegedly responded, “You and your friends are whores — I can buy you and your family,” and threw a drink at him, Grossman contends in a letter filed in Manhattan Criminal Court.
But Klarberg contends in his suit that Grossman was so drunk, she spilled her drink on him twice — once accidentally and once on purpose, after he asked her to apologize.
Both sides concede that surveillance video caught Grossman going at him with the glass.
“For Ms. Grossman to now turn around and blame the victim for her violent action … is outrageous,” Klarberg’s lawyer thundered in an interview.
Klarberg needed 55 stitches to repair the gash to his face, which included a severed artery and resulted in some facial paralysis, his lawsuit contends.
Grossman didn’t mean to hurt him, her lawyer contends, insisting, “It was a very fragile glass.”
Additional reporting by Laura Italiano