Key West cosmetic cream shop sues 15 locals for calling it a ‘rip off’
The owners of a cosmetic cream shop on Key West’s famous Duval Street have sued 15 Key West residents for regularly picketing the store’s entrance with signs and T-shirts that call it a “rip off shop.”
Nir Chen and Zohar Alon, who own Orogold, 518 Duval St., say the protesters have cost them more than $250,000 in profits and have also ruined their reputations through libel, defamation and slander.
The group has accused the store’s employees of preying on the elderly and the mentally disabled, price-gouging and committing credit card fraud.
Chen, who is Israeli, says the protesters have also insulted him for his language and ethnicity. Protesters have denied this.
Though the lawsuit doesn’t mention it, on videos and in photos posted on social media, Orogold employees have called the protesters Nazis and racists.
Neither owner nor their attorney, Antonio Hernandez, could be reached for comment Friday.
The protesters, who call themselves the “Key West Rip Off Rapid Response Team,” which formed in 2015, forced Chen to close a second store in April 2019, five months after he had opened it, according to the lawsuit filed Feb. 19 in Monroe County courts.
The protesters’ actions, the suit states, “continue to take a drastic toll on [Orogold’s] economic well-being and public image.“
The suit has been assigned to Circuit Court Judge Timothy Koenig.
The protesters, led by Bruce Mitchell and Tevis Wernicoff, say they are protecting the reputation of Key West with tourists, who they say get ripped off by cosmetic cream shops such as Orogold.
The Rip Off Team is active on Facebook and members have handed out leaflets on Duval Street calling the store a “rip off.”
“The best defense against libel is truth and we will be vigorously defending ourselves against this frivolous suit,” Wernicoff said Friday.
The group won’t stop because of the lawsuit, he said.
Wernicoff said, “We are also actively recruiting new members who want to help fight these businesses that give all of Key West a bad name”.
Mitchell and Wernicoff are named in the lawsuit, along with 92-year-old protester Shirlee Ezmirly, who protests every Tuesday outside Orogold.
Chen, of Key West, is a member of Gold Empire USA, which opened Orogold in October 2017.
Within a few months, Chen says, protesters Mitchell and Wernicoff came to the shop and threatened to picket it if he didn’t change its no-refund policy.
“This was despite the fact that such a policy was and is not unusual on Duval Street,” Chen said, in an affidavit attached to the complaint.
“He’s trying to make it look like extortion, which it’s not,” said Mitchell, who said he and Wernicoff did visit to advise Chen on good business practices.
Shortly after that meeting, the protesters showed up with signs and kept coming back, often calling out to passersby not to go into the shop and bickering with store employees.
The two sides often take video of each other with cellphones and have posted various videos online in attempts to show that the other side instigates the arguments.
Orogold owners say the protesters’ “harassment” has cost them cash.
“Whereas between January and March of 2018, net profits at Orogold totaled $380,200, these same months produced only $128,671 in 2019 due to the illegal activity from the Rip Off Team and those protesting on its behalf. This represented a loss of $251,529 from the previous year,” the suit states.
Mitchell has said the team’s protests have shut down some cosmetics stores in downtown Key West, where he says there were 11 such shops at one time.
“We haven’t had anyone dropping out because of the lawsuit,” Mitchell said. “We need to expand our base. They do have deeper pockets then we thought. We need to increase the number of pickets we have.”
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