They weren’t helpless victims — they were Golden Girls gone wild!
The elderly residents of a Long Island nursing home decided on their own to throw a spring-break-style male-stripper party in the facility’s rec room — and the old ladies loved every last bump and grind, a lawyer for the facility claimed Tuesday.
A leadership group of more than a dozen residents at the East Neck Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in West Babylon approved the bawdy bacchanal by laying out $250 of their own funds to hire the dirty dancer, the attorney said.
“The home has an activities panel of 16 people — residents — who actually voted to have this event,” said Howard Fensterman, the nursing home’s attorney. “They welcomed it, and it looks like they had a good time.”
Just how good a time could be seen in the faces of the residents captured in a now-infamous photo of the 2012 event, first reported by The Post on Tuesday, in which one of the geriatric residents stuffs cash into the briefs of a Chippendales-style dancer.
The son of that woman, Bernice Youngblood, was so outraged after he found the sleazy snapshot that he filed a lawsuit against the nursing home, claiming his mom was traumatized by the strip show.
Franklin Youngblood insists that the staff organized the beefcake extravaganza for their own “perverse pleasure.” On Tuesday, he rolled his elderly mom before news cameras to insist that she was degraded by the home. With a shaky voice, she said she suffered “shame” from being part of the stripper hoedown.
“None of you all would want this to happen to your parents,” her son insisted. “I grabbed this picture, pulled it out — the minute I seen the picture, I just exploded.”
The Youngblood family, however, may have trouble explaining why Franklin’s wife attended the event and was photographed sitting next to Bernice.
“If Mr. Youngblood wants to sue anybody, he should be suing his own wife,” said Fensterman.
Franklin Youngblood dismissed his wife’s strip-show cameo as irrelevant.
“Regardless of whoever’s in that picture — it’s wrong,” he said.
His attorney, John Ray, added: “This is not a laughing matter. What occurred here, it was not a Gen X bachelorette party. These are elderly Americans who live here in dignity.”
Despite the home’s claims that the residents demanded the strip show, the state Attorney General’s Office is looking into the case, a source told The Post on Tuesday.