Is there a bathroom leak or not?
That seemingly simple, and years-unanswered, question has exploded into a vicious legal battle between Guillermina Girardi and her upper Manhattan co-op complex, Castle Village, which wants to redo her shower to repair an alleged leak into the bathroom below — all at her expense. On top of that: the complex wants Girardi to cough up roughly $200,000 in legal fees over the ongoing dispute.
As for whether there’s actually a leak? The building management claims there is. Ten city inspectors say there isn’t. As for the downstairs neighbor — well, it’s complicated.
In the spring of 2023, six weeks after Girardi moved in, the downstairs neighbors reported “a small leak. It does not seem serious,” according to an email from the managing agent, as seen in court papers. Several months later, management characterized the leak as “an uninhabitable situation.”
Ever since, Girardi and her co-op have been fighting each other in court — with no end in sight.
“There is no leak to repair,” declared Girardi, noting that no licensed master plumber has ever diagnosed a leak, nor have multiple city inspections ever found one.
“The evidence unequivocally shows that there is a leak,” wrote Castle Village’s lawyer, Ingrid Manevitz of Seyfarth Shaw, in court papers. She later wrote that “there is no requirement that a licensed master plumber be involved with this leak repair.”
Manevitz declined The Post’s request comment, as did the co-op’s management.
Last spring, however — three years later — Girardi and her licensed master plumber showed up at the door downstairs in an attempt to identify the leak. They were denied entry. Girardi recorded their conversations, where the neighbors said that damage was visible on the bathroom ceiling, but that they had no leak.
“There is no reason to fix a leak that does not exist,” Girardi told The Post. “The leak is deliberately fabricated to harass a shareholder.”
Girardi, a reproductive immunologist who works for the National Institutes of Health researching maternal health, in part blames the business judgment rule, the law that grants a co-op board enormous power to do what it sees fit.
“The business judgment rule becomes a weapon to hurt people,” she said.
Girardi, 63, received a PhD in pharmacology and toxicology in her native Argentina and came to New York from London as a postdoc in 2000. She bought her Hudson River-facing one-bedroom for $660,000 in late January of 2023. The layout allowed for a renovation to add a private office for her work. Her daughter, an architect in London, drew up plans.
Soon after her arrival, the cliffside Castle Village complex — which comprises five identical buildings in Hudson Heights that opened in 1939 — embarked on a $5 million project to replace its aging gas pipes. The complex gained notoriety for the 2005 collapse of its retaining wall onto the roadway below, necessitating a $23-plus-million restoration project.
Other apartments were to receive a discreet vertical pipe. But the plan for Girardi’s apartment sparked animosity: It included a horizontal pipe across her kitchen ceiling, so as not to disrupt the configuration of the kitchen upstairs. Such a pipe would prevent the creation of her private office, she says.
The co-op sued her for access. “A solution that favors other residents’ aesthetic requests, whilst being detrimental to our apartment . . . is highly discriminatory and wholly unacceptable,” she wrote in court papers. She lost, and complied with the gas-pipe plan.
All the while, the leak dispute festered.
The downstairs neighbor, Ariane Zorgniotti, reported peeling and bubbling on her bathroom ceiling. A contractor applied sealant to the pipes, but the damage recurred, Zorgniotti wrote in an affirmation.
Reached by phone, Zorgniotti declined The Post’s request for comment.
After an inspection by a building employee — who was identified by Girardi as an “unlicensed handyman” and by building representatives as the “assistant superintendent” — Castle Village concluded that the leak “was almost certainly being caused by a problem with [Girardi’s] shower pan,” and sought access for repairs, according to court papers.
After he ran the shower, “the wooden supports around the base of the shower had become wet,” the employee wrote in an affirmation.
Later, checking periodically, he observed that “when the upstairs residents aren’t home for a few days, the ceiling below dries out, and when they return, the moisture levels increase.”
The work proposal includes demolishing Girardi’s stall shower and replacing the bathroom tiles with “building-standard” materials. “This proposal does not include plumber or plumbing work,” according to the plan prepared by the building’s contractor, included in court papers.
Girardi and her husband would need to pony up $9,200 for the work and to vacate for five to eight days. The co-op would pay for a hotel.
A more realistic estimate for redoing the bathroom would be $40,000, Girardi claims. That figure includes replacing the Carrara marble tile that was installed in a 2011 renovation by the previous owner when the tub was replaced with a stall shower.
In fact, in 2018, the previous owner had had a leak that she patched herself with grout. This was never disclosed before purchase, even though the management, the board and the seller knew about it, Girardi said.
Still, taking management’s word, she and her husband applied leftover grout plus silicone sealant to the shower stall.
“We initially cooperated fully,” she said. “Looking back, I deeply regret how naive and trusting I was.”
Girardi has had about 10 bathroom inspections from city agencies, none of which found a leak.
At one point, she tried her own test, pouring a dye called Evans blue, used in tracing blood vessels, down her shower drain.
The superintendent “ignorantly assumed the dye was red,” and told the downstairs neighbors about the dye test. The neighbors said their bathroom ceiling turned red. Regardless of color, the dye would have indicated a drain issue, not a shower-pan issue, Girardi wrote in court papers.
“If the leak were as extensive and persistent as they claim, the apartment below would have been flooded by now,” she told The Post.
“The persistent threat of forced entry into my home without permission instilled a profound sense of stress and fear . . . creating a constant state of apprehension and vulnerability,” Girardi wrote in court papers.
The acrimony escalated. When Girardi and her plumber knocked on the door downstairs, the co-op characterized her behavior as ambushing and harassing.
“If the people below really had a leak, why wouldn’t they let plumbers in so it could be repaired expeditiously?” Girardi said. “Why would they block my master plumber?”
In court papers, the co-op submitted photos of damage on the ceiling downstairs. But with no data about time or location, there’s no proof the photos are valid, Girardi contends.
Now, the co-op is trying to bill her for nearly $170,000 in legal fees.
As for the influential business judgment rule: The courts generally avoid getting involved in such disputes.
“Even if, for argument’s sake, it later turns out that [Castle Village’s] decision and repair plan were wrong, that is completely irrelevant,” wrote the judge, Lyle E. Frank.
“The business judgment rule prohibits judicial interference with corporate decisions . . . even if the decision later turns out to be incorrect.”
As long as a co-op board is acting in good faith, “the board will almost always win,” said Stephen Radin, an attorney who has written widely about the business judgment rule.
If judges had to decide every co-op dispute, “the courts would be inundated,” Radin told The Post. The resident has “the difficult burden of demonstrating the lack of good faith or some kind of animus or abuse of discretion, and that’s a tough standard.”
But the board is not acting in good faith, Girardi maintains — and has never pursued a proper diagnosis by a qualified professional.
The judge agreed that the building has no good evidence of a leak.
“Ultimately, as relating solely to the repair of the shower pan and leak issue, [Castle Village] has not at this time met their burden on the likelihood of success on the merits,” he wrote.
“They have not submitted any reports from plumbers . . . attesting to either the leak or the source, nor are there any . . . affidavits from the downstairs neighbors as to the leak.”
Last month, the management sent a contractor to knock on Girardi’s door, ready to execute the bathroom plan. A recorded conversation shows her asking for the name and license number of the plumber, as well as a permit from the city’s Department of Buildings. The contractor failed to produce the information, and went away.
“I am not refusing access,” Girardi said. “I am not asking anyone to simply believe me. I am asking that the evidence be examined.”
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