Violence, Revenge Porn, and Jail

Three months ago, a mysterious website was taken offline on the order of a Florida judge. The site seemed like the work of an amateur; clusters of low-quality images crowded the homepage, and a bright red banner garishly lined the top. Yet the creator had been savvy enough to conceal their identity; they had registered the site with an encrypted email account and paid with bitcoin to host it.

The website’s domain name—realmpatrickcarroll.com—referred to Patrick Carroll, a prominent real estate investor based in the Southeast whose firm manages $7.4 billion in assets. Carroll is a master of self-promotion. He boasts 1.1 million Instagram followers, has participated in charity auctions alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, and has been interviewed on CNBC, CBS, Bloomberg, and Fox Business.

But this site was not designed to promote Carroll. It seemed intended to end his career.

The website outlined several dark allegations. Carroll, it claimed, was an “abuser” with a long rap sheet who had made homophobic comments on social media. The most damning material was a clip from a taped call between Carroll and his now ex-wife in September 2019, just before he filed for divorce, in which he admitted to domestic violence. Carroll’s attorneys have since claimed he didn’t know he was being recorded.

The clip was so damaging that Carroll sought a court order to have it removed from the internet, arguing in part that in Florida—where the call took place—both parties must consent to being taped. A federal judge in New York rejected his request last year, but a state judge in Florida agreed to issue a temporary injunction in February.

The Daily Beast heard a copy of the recording still preserved on an internet archive, and it’s clear why Carroll fought so hard to keep it private.

In one portion, his former wife, Lindsey, discusses an incident in which he allegedly hit her while she was holding their young child, then struck her twice more while she was on the ground.

“Here’s your chance to divorce me over that, or else you’ve got to let it go,” Carroll replies.

She then recounts a subsequent incident, in which he allegedly slapped her across the face three times and choked her.

“I’m not sorry, because you caused it,” Carroll says. “I’ll say I’m sorry for getting physical with you… [but] you lied to my face that day, by the way. So think about the woman you love lying to your face, and that does some weird things.”

As the conversation continues, Carroll’s voice grows louder. “I think I’m great, other people think I’m great. I don’t care if you think I’m great,” he thunders. “I love you, but I can unlove you, okay? I’m not proving myself for some 40-year-old bitch like yourself.”

The conduct seems to fit a larger pattern for Carroll. On television, he is the consummate businessman, pontificating on interest rates and fluctuations in the housing market. Privately, his volatile behavior has created one enemy after another, according to hundreds of pages of legal records reviewed by The Daily Beast.

Carroll’s ex-wife claimed he threatened to kill her and members of her family unless she signed a postnuptial agreement. He trashed her divorce lawyer on social media. After feuding with a local couple, he texted the husband and called his wife a “cunt” and a “dog.” He recently made headlines for allegedly spitting on a restaurant manager.

In response to a request for comment from The Daily Beast, Carroll said: “How about you write about all the good things I do? Maybe that would be better to inspire entrepreneurship and not just try to cancel?” In a second email, he added, “You seek out everything bad, probably never had or never will do something with [your] lives, and I am very proud of who I am. Most of this shit is complete lies and a result of being successful and maggots like you trying to promote the cancel culture. And by the way fuck yourselve[s].”

His lawyer, Duncan Levin, offered a more measured statement. “We all know that people can make any false accusations especially against someone like Patrick Carroll who has very deep pockets,” he said. “Despite these abuse allegations, Patrick has never been arrested or charged with domestic violence…Old rehashed court papers filled with endless mudslinging doesn’t show who Mr. Carroll is today.”

Recently, Carroll has leveraged his massive Instagram following in an effort to humiliate his former wife. Earlier this year, he posted a video to his account that showed her having sex in the backyard of a luxury home. In the caption, he called her “the white trash mother of my sons” and assailed her for continuing “to bring me to court for $$$,” according to two people who saw the video and a screen recording of the post reviewed by The Daily Beast.

An attorney for Lindsey Carroll said of the situation, “If Mr. Carroll in fact published this video, then it would be consistent with a historical pattern of abuse against Ms. Carroll.” The attorney added that, in January, Carroll emailed his former wife as she was pursuing contempt proceedings against him. “I will make your sex tape… go viral if you don’t stop,” he allegedly wrote.

Carroll may potentially have committed a crime by sharing the video, said Richard Hornsby, a criminal defense attorney based in Orlando, since it could be interpreted as a violation of the state’s sexual cyberharassment statute. Stephanie Cagnet Myron, a victim’s rights attorney, said Carroll potentially may have violated other laws, including those related to harassment or stalking.

Carroll wrote about the video in a court filing this month, which sought to modify the terms of his divorce agreement and argued that his ex-wife was an unfit custodian for their children on multiple fronts. (Her attorney denied the allegations.) Carroll noted that her sexual encounter took place in “broad daylight” and was filmed by people in a passing boat. The video then spread online and throughout the Tampa Bay area, he said.

“The children,” Carroll lamented in the filing, “are now exposed to the risk of one day seeing the video or having their current or future classmates see the video.” And yet he had shared it himself.

Carroll was just 24 when he founded his firm, and according to his company’s website, he decided to select a name “big enough to match his ambition”: his own.

The real estate industry offered Carroll a fresh start. He hadn’t attended college and, as he later acknowledged, “got in some trouble” as a teenager and young adult. By the time he turned 21, he had already been caught driving under the influence twice, he said in a 2019 deposition.

Carroll reportedly launched his property career by flipping a condo, then moved into constructing apartments and homes. When the 2008 recession hit, he sensed opportunity. “Everybody I knew had 100% mortgages,” he told this reporter in an unpublished interview for Forbes in 2021. “I thought there was going to be a wave of foreclosures pushing people into the apartment market. And so that’s [what] I bought.” His firm went on to acquire 70,000 units, he said.

In 2014, Carroll encountered more legal trouble. An executive at his firm, Suzanne Hicks, filed a lawsuit claiming that Carroll had retaliated against her after she requested accommodations to care for her husband while he dealt with heart problems.

At first, the suit claimed, Carroll had been helpful. But he lost patience and demanded she return to work. Hicks told human resources that she might need to take leave as part of the Family and Medical Leave Act, she alleged in court filings, but she was informed that Carroll had “denied” her request. (The Daily Beast was unable to reach Hicks for comment.)

After her husband suffered yet another heart scare, Hicks again requested FMLA leave, the lawsuit said. Carroll then called her, “yelling and cursing at her, and telling her that she was fired,” the lawsuit claimed. He allegedly also told her that he “gave a ‘black man’” her job.

Carroll’s lawyers denied most of the allegations, though they acknowledged human resources had told Hicks she was a “key employee” and that the firm might not hold her job if she took family leave. Carroll and the firm also filed a counterclaim asserting that she had submitted false invoices during her tenure. (Hicks denied the accusation.)

The parties jointly filed to dismiss the case after reaching a confidential agreement in February 2015.

By 2019, Carroll’s business was thriving. The firm had switched its approach to raising new capital; instead of collaborating with high-net-worth investors, it started receiving large infusions from institutions like pension plans, insurance companies, and private equity firms.

But his personal life was deteriorating. That March, Carroll was arrested for disorderly conduct on a skiing trip in Vail, Colorado. After growing upset that his children’s ski lessons were delayed, he got into a tiff with a resort supervisor, blasting him as a “fucking redneck from Mississippi,” according to the police report. After a series of increasingly hostile interactions, Carroll allegedly told a resort security officer that he was a “worthless security guard who is about to get knocked out.” He was taken to the local jail and told not to trespass on the mountain. (Carroll pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and paid a $300 fine.)

Just five months after his arrest, he landed in yet another controversy, when a friend of the Carrolls named Samantha Mirabella filed a petition in Florida circuit court seeking an injunction for protection against stalking. A temporary injunction was almost immediately imposed.

Carroll later wrote in his own court filings that Mirabella and her husband, Tony, had pursued a business deal with him involving their car dealership. He claimed he “rejected” the proposal and the relationship fell apart. (Samantha Mirabella’s petition suggested the relationship may have devolved after a conflict at a Little League game. The Mirabellas declined to comment.)

Carroll did not comport himself well. “Big fat broke tony… Take your old cunt of a wife out of my gym too,” he wrote in one text. “Hang yourselves,” he said in another.

Carroll allegedly accosted Samantha Mirabella after running into her at the gym, leading the gym’s employees to escort him out. Carroll then texted Tony Mirabella and told him to “get a leash on your dog.”

Carroll’s attorneys said that witnesses to the gym incident recalled things differently than the initial petition claimed. And even if the accusations were true, they argued, most of Carroll’s alleged behavior was directed at Tony, not Samantha, which rendered her stalking allegations moot. A judge dismissed the case, saying there wasn’t enough evidence to issue a permanent injunction.

Other, far more serious allegations remained active. In September 2019—roughly a month after Samantha Mirabella filed her petition, and just after Carroll filed for divorce—Carroll’s wife submitted her own petition for an injunction seeking protection against domestic violence, outlining an alleged pattern of misconduct. In it, she described two violent assaults that were also discussed in the taped call and referenced a third incident, in which she said Carroll picked her up, “carried me inside and threw me to the ground.”

During one of the violent attacks, she claimed, Carroll choked her and put his mouth over her nose to inhibit her breathing. Then, her filing continued, “he stopped and said he wished he could just kill me but society won’t let him.”

Just two days later, his wife alleged in her court filing, Carroll told her that they were getting divorced and allegedly demanded that she “first sign a document saying 100% of the money is his or he will have me killed, my dad killed and my brother killed.”

According to the petition, Carroll owned $500,000 in firearms, including AK-47s, AR-15s, handguns, shotguns, and silencers. (The temporary injunction was granted almost immediately, and a permanent injunction was issued in January 2020. Later, the Carrolls filed a joint motion to vacate the injunction, though Patrick still had to stay away from his former wife.)

After the initial petition was filed, Carroll disputed the abuse allegations in his own court filing, arguing that his wife had engaged in a “nefarious” effort to falsely depict him as violent. “NOTHING IS FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH,” he wrote, adding that “it is becoming apparent that she is attempting a ‘money grab.’”

Soon after, the domestic violence case was merged with the couple’s divorce proceedings, and in December 2019, the court issued a temporary order regarding child support and alimony. It gave Carroll’s wife exclusive use of their Tampa home—a 5,700-square-foot mansion on the bay now worth about $5 million—and required him to pay her $30,000 per month in alimony and up to $48,000 per month for security services, among other stipulations.

But Carroll didn’t make the required payments, the judge said. That February, the court found him guilty of indirect criminal contempt and sentenced him to 16 days in jail. The divorce wasn’t finalized until October 2021.

The divorce proceedings precipitated even more litigation, after Carroll found a new enemy in his wife’s lawyer, Michael Lundy. During Carroll’s deposition in the divorce case, he referred to Lundy as a “little worm,” a “queer,” and “the evilest person I’ve ever heard of or met.”

Carroll posted a series of images to his Instagram page blasting Lundy as “dirty” and “fat,” and insisting that he “messes with young children.” He also taunted Lundy by asserting that he was secretly gay. (Lundy’s attorney says he is heterosexual and is in fact married to a woman.) “[Y]ou can come out of the closet,” Carroll wrote in one post, which included an image of himself wearing a court-ordered ankle monitor.

“Please someone get this guy a little hormone replacement therapy. He oozes Estrogen,” he wrote in another.

In a video, Carroll allegedly provoked Lundy further. “Don’t think about a slander lawsuit, because we know how that would go. I’m richer, more talented, and I’ll win,” he said. Indeed, Lundy did not file a slander suit. Instead, in November 2021, he sued Carroll for five counts of libel (one of which was later dismissed). Lundy did not sue over the claims that he is gay, saying the statements were false and juvenile but not “insulting”; he focused on Carroll’s other aspersions.

This April, Lundy filed a motion seeking to add an additional count and punitive damages, after Carroll posted another image in the fall. The case is still ongoing.

If his Instagram persona is to be believed, the courtroom battles haven’t kept Carroll from enjoying his wealth. Until recently, his photos depicted the lifestyle of a playboy, replete with private planes and beautiful women. (In one characteristic post, he was pictured reclining on a bed and smoking an unknown substance, with an attractive woman beside him.)

In August 2021, Carroll joined high-profile attorney Joe Tacopina—who just represented Donald Trump in the sexual abuse lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll—as an investor in a second-tier soccer club in Italy. The next February, he dropped $16.4 million on a seven-bedroom mansion in Miami Beach. And in August 2022, he was in Capri, Italy, for a charitable gala (where he allegedly got into a “brawl” at a party, according to Page Six).

Carroll has generated more favorable press for giving away hundreds of thousands of dollars in free sneakers to children at Boys & Girls Clubs as part of a program called Kicks for Kids, which he says is just one of numerous charitable endeavors. (His LinkedIn profile cheerfully proclaims, “Patrick is incredibly philanthropic.”) Carroll’s lawyer added in his statement to The Daily Beast that Carroll “grew up with nothing and is entirely self made. He’s a very successful man who gives back millions of dollars to those in need and dedicates his time to make a difference in the world.”

Carroll’s Instagram presence has also been cleaned up, perhaps in light of news that he is considering selling all or part of his company. Most of his old posts have been deleted, save for 27 that convey a more erudite, professional persona. Earlier this spring, for instance, he posted an image of himself reclining in a plush chair and peering into a book about Basquiat. “I love to learn,” he captioned it, “and art has certainly been one of the most interesting things I’ve studied.”

But to some in the industry, Carroll remains the same as ever. In April, The Real Deal reported that he had been banned from a restaurant in Miami after he appeared to make moves on a woman who was seated with another man, leading the manager to intervene. Later, as Carroll was leaving the restaurant, the manager “extended his hand as if to make peace.” But as a video of the encounter captured, Carroll instead appeared “to spit in his face.”

Carroll’s spokesperson told The Real Deal that Carroll had only “pantomimed” spitting. The real scandal, the flack suggested, was that the manager had tried to bait Carroll into a conflict, supposedly by saying, “I know who you are. I want you to hit me so I can get paid.” (The manager denied this.)

Carroll sent a letter of apology to the manager the day after the incident. But was he truly remorseful? In a since-deleted comment on The Real Deal’s Instagram post about the story, he claimed—in apparent contrast to the video evidence—that the manager had told him “to go F [himself]” when Carroll went to shake his hand.

“And,” Carroll added defiantly, “I got the girls number.”