California nurse awarded $300k after downing 14 shots and blaming cruise for blacking out
Earlier this month, a federal jury in Miami awarded $300,000 in damages to a California nurse who was served at least 14 shots of tequila over several hours on a Carnival Cruise ship.
Diana Sanders, 45, a nurse from Vacaville, California, filed a lawsuit against the Carnival Corporation after these shots caused the crash. As a result, he says he suffered multiple injuries, including a possible traumatic brain injury.
A waiter serves drinks aboard the Carnival cruise ship Freedom docked in the port of Civitavecchia, Italy, on October 16, 2007. (Victor Sokolowicz/Bloomberg)
The incident on Carnival Radiance occurred on January 5, 2024. FOX 43. According to court documents, he drank at least 14 shots of tequila over a period of approximately eight and a half hours, from 2:58 p.m. to 11:37 p.m.
That requires some work at the bar, as newly released security footage from the cruise ship shows. What the footage doesn’t show is that Sanders fell to the ground as he claimed.
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He said he fainted, fell down the stairs and later found unexplained bruises. Carnival says the decline didn’t happen.
The controversial fall resulted in “serious injuries, including but not limited to concussions, headaches, possible traumatic brain injury, back injuries, tailbone injuries, bruising, and other injuries,” according to the complaint.
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The $300,000 awarded to Sanders by the jury reportedly exceeded the $250,000 his legal team requested during the trial.
A Carnival cruise ship docks near a pier in Willemstad, Curacao, in the turquoise waters of the Caribbean Sea on February 9, 2025. (Getty Images)
The jury agreed that Carnival personnel failed “in its responsibility to supervise and/or assist passengers on board who Carnival knew or should have known or were likely to engage in conduct that was potentially dangerous to themselves or others.”
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Carnival is unhappy with the outcome of the hearing, and a spokesman said the company “respectfully disagrees with the decision and believes there are grounds for a new hearing and appeal and will pursue it.”
I’ll leave the legal aspects of all this to the litigation in Washington, but from the standpoint that anything is possible, it’s incredible. It’s not easy to turn eight hours spent at the bar into $300,000.
