RETURN: Tennis ref Lois “Lolo” Goodman is happy to be reinstated and working at the upcoming US Open a year after being hauled off (above) on suspicion of killing her husband. (Gregory P. Mango)
RETURN: Tennis ref Lois “Lolo” Goodman is happy to be reinstated and working at the upcoming US Open a year after being hauled off (inset) on suspicion of killing her husband. (
)
The feisty tennis umpire who was hauled off in handcuffs from a New York hotel just before last year’s US Open — accused of bludgeoning her elderly husband to death with a coffee mug in their California home — will be back at the tournament this month after being cleared in the botched case, The Post has learned.
This time around, fully reinstated referee Lois “Lolo” Goodman, 71, is hoping to keep a low profile at the Flushing Meadows event.
“She’s apprehensive about returning; she doesn’t want to draw attention,” her daughter, Joan Goodman, said in a phone interview. “The players, the tennis, that is the focus. She is grateful that she has her job, and she wants to be able to do it without distraction.”
Still, Goodman hasn’t forgotten the embarrassment that surrounded the 2012 Open — and this week ripped into the LAPD, claiming it orchestrated her arrest as a publicity stunt to humiliate her after they became convinced she’d murdered her ailing spouse, Alan Goodman, 80, in their LA condo.
Her husband died in April 2012, likely of a heart attack, according to one expert, but LAPD detectives waited until “just hours before Mrs. Goodman was about to referee a tennis match at the United States Open — one of the most prestigious events of its kind,” lawyers for Goodman blasted in a Los Angeles federal suit filed Wednesday.
“[They] alerted the media so that Mrs. Goodman would be filmed being arrested and handcuffed” at the Sheraton, the documents note. “Mrs. Goodman [was] taken to the notorious Rikers Island jail. She spent two nights in Dickensian conditions.”
“The LAPD told the media Mrs. Goodman was having an affair and an Internet relationship with two [US Open] officials, which they knew was not true.”
Tennis officials suspended the well-respected Goodman for five months as the case played out.
Even after her reinstatement, the suit claims, “the public humiliation is unending. There are whispers and pointed fingers whereever she goes.”
LA prosecutors dropped the case four months after Goodman’s arrest for lack of evidence. Medical experts determined that Alan Goodman’s death was likely the result of an accident and that a shattered coffee cup near the scene did not kill him.
Goodman’s suit claims false arrest, civil-rights violations, malicious prosecution and intentional infliction of emotional distress and seeks unspecified punitive damages and reimbursement of more than $100,000 in legal fees.