An elderly New York City woman is suing President Donald Trump’s family business following an incident involving Trump Tower’s famous “golden escalator” that allegedly left her badly hurt.
Mariko Hosoi, 76, “was lawfully and carefully inside the glass-enclosed atrium of the Trump Tower” on Dec. 29, 2024, when she took the building’s trademark gold-tone escalator from the lobby up to the second floor of the commander-in-chief’s eponymous Midtown Manhattan skyscraper, according to a newly filed lawsuit obtained by The Independent.
After stepping off the escalator, Hosoi began “carefully walking” to one of the building’s five eateries, her complaint states. That’s when she slipped and fell on “an accumulation of a slippery substance,” sustaining “serious and severe permanent personal injuries,” according to the complaint, which blames Hosoi’s accident on “the negligence of the defendant The Trump Organization, Inc., its agents, servants, and/or employees.”
Hosoi’s lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday night in Manhattan Supreme Court, takes the Trump Organization to task for “negligent ownership, operation, maintenance, management, supervision, inspection, and control of the premises and the atrium.”
The complaint says the company and its staffers caused and created a “dangerous condition” for guests by, among other things, “failing to have sufficient personnel to mop the floor,” “failing to have a proper cleaning regiment [sic],” “failing to block off the area,” and “failing to dry the floor, despite notice.”
Hosoi has since been left “sick, sore, lame and disabled,” was forced to spend money on medical treatment, and was “unable to attend to her usual vocation or activities,” the complaint states.
The Trump Organization did not respond on Thursday to a request for comment.
In June 2015, Trump was roundly mocked for descending the same escalator from the lobby to the basement to announce his nascent presidential campaign. As a modest crowd of a few dozen people looked on, Trump exulted in seeing what he claimed was a teeming sea of fervent supporters packing the space.
“Wow!” the future president crowed as he began speaking from a temporary stage erected for the event. “Whoa! That is some group of people. Thousands!”
But the audience had in fact been cobbled together by Trump aides, and included actors paid $50 to attend, Trump Tower residents and foreign tourists who reportedly had little idea why they were there.
“There were some people who lived in the building who had come down, and then there were just a lot of people just kind of from off the street who had come in to see it,” one reporter who was there told The Guardian. “There was a lot of just random curiosity happening.”
“It seemed like a joke at the time,” said an adviser to candidate Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor.
Trump then delivered a dark, cynical, and jingoistic address that denigrated Mexicans as rapists and drug dealers and subsequently made headlines around the world for its direly pessimistic tone. Eight months later, he was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States.
In 2014, New York real estate mogul Stephen Green sued after slipping on wet marble in the Trump World Tower at Columbus Circle, claiming a housekeeper had failed to put up a caution sign after mopping.
The following year, a Kentucky woman sued the Trump International Beach Resort in South Florida after falling on an “unreasonably slippery” pool deck.
Last March, the family of a wheelchair-bound California woman sued after she was “violently ejected” from a revolving door at the Trump Hotel Las Vegas, striking her face on the pavement and later dying.
Hosoi is demanding a money judgment to be determined in court. The Trump Organization now has roughly three weeks to file a formal response to the allegations.
