A former medical spa worker asked a jury Wednesday to award her $25 million in damages for being used as an “experimental guinea pig” and making it “nearly impossible” to achieve orgasm.
Lawyers for plaintiff Jaime Herwehe and defendants Dr. Nadine Haddad and her B Medical Spa & Wellness Center near Balboa Park made their closing arguments after a 10-day trial in downtown Superior Court.
Herwehe (HER-Way) says Haddad in March 2021 pressured her to have an O-Shot into her clitoris and vagina — and didn’t explain its risks or side effects beforehand.
She also alleges that she was fired for not signing a written consent form 42 days after the procedure — the basis for a claim of illegal retaliation.
Haddad’s lead attorney, Jack Reinholtz, told a nine-man, three-woman jury that the shot — touted as a way of boosting women’s sexual function — went awry when the expired lidocaine local anesthetic didn’t numb the area.
He said proper damages would be $20,000 for a medical negligence claim. And he asserted Herwehe, 32, was fired for unauthorized use of a spa credit card and conspiring — with her older sister, the spa manager — to forge documents.
“She consented to the procedure. Period. End of story,” Reinholtz said.
After the jury left Judge Carolyn Caietti’s courtroom to begin deliberations in a nearby fifth-floor room, Herwehe’s attorney Josh Gruenberg was asked how the $25 million demand was arrived at.
“We felt that the loss of sexual function is a major loss of a component of a good life,” he told Times of San Diego. “And to a lot of people, their sex life is important to them. And the sex life involves love, it involves partnership, involves pleasure. And, you know, nobody’s going to dispute that orgasms are important.”
After Caietti spent 56 minutes explaining the law in the case and going step-by-step through a six-page verdict form, Gruenberg began an hour-long closing. He said Herwehe had a remaining life expectancy of 51.3 years — when she’d never again feel sexual pleasure.
“Sadly, all we have is money” as a means of achieving justice, he said with an angry tone. “That is the only remedy.”
He asked the jury to award $5 million for past harm and $20 million for future suffering even though “money doesn’t make up for what happened,” including Herwehe’s breakup with her boyfriend of nearly nine years — the father of her now 4-year-old daughter.
“The relationship didn’t survive the O-Shot,” Gruenberg said, alleging that the practice jabs were meant to pave the way for treatments costing $1,600 to $2,000.
Gruenberg also called for unspecified punitive damages based on his contention Haddad and her husband, office manager Mark Khashram, engaged in malice, oppression or fraud. (Only one is needed to trigger punitive damages, which would be decided after the verdicts.)
Attorney Reinholtz — speaking in calm, measured tones — depicted Haddad as a highly educated professional who, while living in Pennsylvania, bought the B Med Spa in December 2020 from an absentee owner in Texas.
He said Haddad and her husband, with business acumen and a Ph.D., found a San Diego operation where employees including spa manager Jessyca De Lara, Herwehe’s older sister, had “run amuck, free to do whatever they wanted.”
Reinholtz said De Lara made unauthorized credit-card purchases and signed Haddad’s name on invoices and permit applications. (De Lara, when questioned Tuesday virtually from her home in Georgia, provided evidence that Haddad was fine with the forged signatures.)
The defense counsel said Herwehe was targeted for firing even before she refused to sign a written O-Shot consent form emailed her in May 2021 .
Further, Reinholtz said Dr. James Tappan, a retired obstetrician-gynecologist called as an expert witness by Herwehe, wasn’t an expert in the O-Shot and never examined the plaintiff.
In his 80-minute closing argument, The 60-year-old attorney also questioned why Herwehe never sought help for her vaginal ills from a neurologist or sex therapist.
(On the stand, Herwehe said she was to meet with her primary care physician, but her insurance expired after her firing and couldn’t make the appointment. Her lawyers noted that Haddad called no expert medical witness to justify the O-Shot.)
Reinholtz insisted that Herwehe “knew what she was getting into” when she submitted to the O-Shot using her own blood platelets on March 30, 2021. “She knew the risks involved” and wanted the benefits Haddad promoted.
“The whole point of the shot is better orgasms,” he said. “Even if she felt pressured, she had plenty of steps to walk away.”
Reinholtz listed 19 examples of Herwehe giving consent for the O-Shot by word or conduct.
As far as the breakup with her boyfriend, he said, it was doomed because he didn’t want to marry. And they made only one attempt at couples counseling.
He said she couldn’t prove her vaginal sensitivity and later numbness.
Reinholtz said it would be “totally fair” to pay her $20,000 for “passing out, having pain and a couple days of recovery.”
Pamela Vallero, Gruenberg’s 38-year-old co-counsel, delivered a half-hour rebuttal with the theme of the defense team “writing a bunch of checks they couldn’t cash” (meaning they made arguments they couldn’t prove).
She countered a Reinholtz claim that Herwehe never went to an outside agency such as the state medical board with a complaint. She cited the retaliation law, which only called for her to report her gripes to her own employer.
Vallero also said Khashram could have fired her at any time after he discovered her alleged financial wrongdoing — but didn’t until after ordering her to sign the consent form.
“He did not fire her then (in the month after spotting issues) because it was not his plan,” Vallero said of Khashram, noting that he didn’t conduct an investigation — “HR 101” — and didn’t even prepare a final check for May 12, the day she was let go.
Vallero invoked “CYA” — cover your ass — to explain the defendants’ actions.
After delivering a standard standing-up address to the jury, Vallero took her laptop to the witness box. And for the first time in her legal career, she sat down and read a plaintiff’s testimony.
With only a reporter, two Gruenberg law firm lawyers and Vallero’s father- and mother-in-law observing, she quoted Herwehe as saying “I feel like a stranger in my own body” and “I don’t want to have sex anymore,” among other expressions of pain and frustration.
(“The conduct by the defendants was so egregious that it merited a different approach to really convey to the jurors what had occurred,” she’d later say.)
Judge Caietti soon sent the jury on its way, letting the three male and one female alternate jurors tag along but not take part in deliberations. (Just to observe in case they were called as substitutes for the main 12-member panel.)
With the jury gone, Vallero put her arms around Herwehe, wearing a pinstripe pant suit.
Opposing lawyers Gruenberg and Reinholtz, in matching dark-blue suits, shook hands.
