Patrick Carroll Hit With Defamation Case Tied To Spit Incident

Patrick Carroll apparently has a hard time being nice to workers at fancy restaurants, and now is facing legal trouble because of it. 

A restaurant manager in Miami’s Wynwood who Carroll allegedly spat on — as first reported by The Real Deal — sued the Miami Beach-based real estate mogul for defamation last week. 

Carroll founded Carroll Organization, an Atlanta-based real estate investment firm with $7.4 billion worth of multifamily properties across the U.S. He is currently looking to sell his eponymous company. 

Carroll has a notorious short fuse. In his complaint filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, Miguel Angel Weill highlights a pair of Carroll’s alleged incidents at other South Florida dining establishments frequented by wealthy and famous people. Carroll was banned from all restaurants owned by New York-based Major Food Group and New York restauranter Simon Kim, according to the complaint. 

At Major Food’s Carbone in Miami Beach’s South of Fifth neighborhood, Carroll allegedly called a service manager a “street N-word” after being asked to leave the Italian restaurant for allegedly harassing a waiter and being overly intoxicated, Weill’s lawsuit alleges. The alleged incident took place in December.

The complaint states Carroll also used an “F-word” homophobic slur against a staffer at Kim’s Cote Miami restaurant in the Miami Design District. It doesn’t say when the incident took place. After being banned from Cote, Carroll allegedly reached out to Kim, asking the Korean entrepreneur not to say anything bad about him, the lawsuit claims. 

Kim and Major Food Group did not respond to requests for comment. 

Carroll has not been served with Weill’s lawsuit, so he cannot speak to the specific allegations in it, Carroll’s attorney Duncan Levin said via an emailed statement. 

His client is focused on his philanthropy, including “personally handing out” $100,000 worth of sneakers to a Boys & Girls Club in New York this week as part of a $1 million shoe giveaway to underserved and underprivileged youth, Levin said. 

“He will fight any accusations in court, not the press,” Levin said. 

This is the second time Carroll is sued for defamation in the past two years. 

In 2021, Michael Lundy, a Tampa-based divorce lawyer who represented Carroll’s ex-wife in their messy break-up, sued the real estate investor in Hillsborough County for allegedly making false statements about the attorney on social media. 

In the latest lawsuit, Weill, a maître d’ and manager at the Wynwood eatery Hiyakawa Miami, alleges Carroll falsely accused him of attempted extortion via comments that Carroll Organization’s spokesperson, Lewis Goldberg, provided to TRD in April, the lawsuit states. 

At the time, TRD obtained closed circuit video footage from Hiyakawa’s owner Alvaro Perez Miranda that he and Weill claimed shows Carroll spitting in the maître d’s face. Miranda said he and his partners banned Carroll from all their restaurants.

Carroll admitted to having a confrontation with Weill, but denied that spit flew out of his mouth, Goldberg told TRD. Goldberg’s comment that Weill allegedly told Carroll “I want you to hit me so I can get paid” was defamatory, the lawsuit states.

The alleged spitting incident and its aftermath have been “quite a traumatic experience” for Weill, said his lawyer Anthony Narula. “[Weill] has been under a great deal of stress and anxiety,” Narula said. “He is passionate about what he does, and the incident has prevented him from fully focusing on that.”

In his complaint, Weill claims that he also suffered emotional distress due to a legal threat from Carroll if he didn’t retract his statements to TRD. “Mr. Carroll could have come to the restaurant and given Miguel a sincere apology for his outrageous conduct,” Narula said. “Instead he sent a demand letter to Miguel with a threat of a lawsuit.”