Joan Rivers’ daughter Melissa files suit in mother’s death
Dan Steinberg/AP Joan Rivers, 81, went under the knife for the last time on Aug. 28. Her daughter Melissa is now suing over her death. Joan Rivers’ daughter filed a multimillion dollar lawsuit Monday against the clinic and the doctors who treated her mother last August, charging that their negligence triggered a coma that finished in her mother’s death.
Rivers, 81, died of brain hurt caused by a loss of oxygen during a routine outpatient procedure where doctors were supposed to do an endoscopy and examine her throat for possible causes of voice changes.
The doctors did those procedures but they also did an unauthorized examination of her vocal chords and windpipe that resulted in a laryngospasm. With the spasm, her throat seized up and deprived her brain of oxygen. She also couldn’t expel carbon dioxide from her lungs and the result was a heart attack and irreversible brain hurt, the lawsuit alleged.
Instead of stopping the laryngoscopy midway to stabilize her when her essential signs showed signs of distress, the doctors continued with the procedure and she went into cardiac arrest.
The complaint alleges that for 20 minutes while doctors tried to revive her, unknown performed a trachetomy to open up her airways
“Had doctors acted as physicians for Joan Rivers instead of groupies, Joan Rivers would have been doing ‘Fashion Police’ last week,” said one family lawyer Jeffrey Bloom.
View Gallery Remembering the well-known figures we lost in 2014Rivers left the clinic in a coma and died seven days later.
Rivers’ only child, Melissa, 47, filed the lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court Monday, naming five doctors and the clinic as defendants.
Melissa Rivers said she filed the lawsuit because of her “unwavering belief” that no family should suffer as hers did.
“The level of medical mismanagement, incompetency, disrespect and outrageous behavior is shocking and frankly almost incomprehensible.
“Not only did my mother deserve better, every patient deserves better,” she said.
Anthony DelMundo/New York Day after day News NYPD police officers walk into Yorkville Endoscopy, where comedian Joan Rivers underwent an unauthorized examination that resulted in her death. Yorkville Endoscopy, the East 93rd Road clinic where Rivers was seen as an outpatient, came under heavy fire from state and federal shape officials after the Aug. 28 operation.
Investigators learned that the clinic’s medical director, Lawrence Cohen, allowed River’s private doctor, celebrity ear-nose-and-throat specialist Gwen Korovin, to do the unauthorized biopsy even though Korovin wasn’t vacant to work at the clinic.
They also learned that he took a picture of Korovin with her heavily anesthesized patient in the operating room .
Cohen was discharged by the clinic almost immediately. Despite its best efforts to satisfy investigators that clinic staff had cleaned up their act, Yorkville is in danger of losing its federal official approval in March. That would bar it from charging Medicare or Medicaid for procedures on any of its patients.
Experts said Rivers’ estate could collect millions of dollars in a negligence suit because the perpetually-busy comedian was still making money from stand-up gigs, books and her television shows.
James Keivom/New York Day after day News Melissa Rivers (right), daughter of comedienne Joan Rivers, and Cooper Endicott, 13, grandson of Rivers, attending the funeral service the late comedy icon. Rivers performed at a Manhattan comedy club the night before she slipped into a coma.
Melissa Rivers hired the high-powered Manhattan law firm of Gair, Gair, Conanson, Stiegman, Maloof, Bloom and Rubinowitz last October, about two months after her mother’s death.
Melissa Rivers, as executor of her mother’s estate, filed the lawsuit. She was the only child of the caustic comedian, and became her mother’s TV collaborator on a number of projects.
The Brooklyn-born comic underwent the procedure because his voice had recently turned raspy, and Rivers was worried about the produce.
Former chief New York Medical Examiner Michael Baden said Rivers’ death came as a result of a “therapeutic misadventure.”
He also predicted the current medical examiner’s report on what happened opened the door to “a very honest lawsuit.”
