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Chicago jury sides with Trump in tower dispute
May 23, 2013 – A jury in downtown Chicago needed just one day to decide Donald Trump does not owe anything to an Evanston woman who claimed she was cheated in a deal involving two condominium units at River North’s Trump International Hotel & Tower. “I’m gratified that this Chicago jury rejected my opponent’s misguided attempt to make this a ‘Chicago versus New York’ case,” Trump’s attorney, Stephen Novack told Loop North News after the verdict. “Instead, the jurors properly applied the law to the evidence presented at the trial.” Attorneys for Jacqueline Goldberg, the woman who was suing Trump, were expecting a verdict before the weekend. Reached Thursday morning long before the verdict, Jeffrey Kulwin said it looked to him “like the jury was paying careful attention to the evidence during the trial and I would expect them to take the same careful approach during deliberations.”
The dispute was over the sale in 2006 of two condo units at the 92-story Trump Tower. Goldberg, an 87-year-old CPA, certified financial planner, and real estate investor, said she was persuaded to buy the units when told she would also own part of hotel facilities at Trump that could generate $5 million in revenue per year. When Donald Trump exercised a clause in the purchase agreement allowing him to take back the hotel facilities, he offered instead to pay the condo association $500,000 per year to let him run the facilities. Goldberg said that if she had known they were going to do that, “I would not have gone through with the sale.” Also an issue was a change in how units were rented to hotel guests. Originally, a computer assigned units equitably but over time the hotel manager was given discretion as to how they were assigned, a system Goldberg believed was unfair. In addition to her $516,000 deposit, Goldberg was seeking damages totaling about $6 million. Previous stories… |
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