A years-long dispute over an alleged “Rothko” forgery has culminated in a total victory for our client, a distinguished New York art dealer.  The lawsuit began in 2019, when Hollywood executive Ron Meyer filed a lawsuit in California over a 2001 art deal, alleging he bought an artwork which, many years later, he said had been determined to be a fake.  He brought claims for fraud, negligent misrepresentation, breach of warranty, and rescission of the sale.
 
In the early stages of the case, the Grossman team first successfully removed the case to federal court, and then persuaded that court to transfer the case to the Southern District of New York.  And in the summer of 2021, that court granted our motion to dismiss the case in its entirety.  The Court held that Meyer’s claims—filed nearly two decades after his purchase—were legally deficient for numerous reasons, including that they were barred by the applicable statutes of limitations and that Meyer simply did not allege any factual basis for asserting fraud. 
 
Meyer then appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which affirmed the dismissal, concluding that the district court had properly dismissed with prejudice the warranty, rescission, and negligent misrepresentation claims as time-barred.  The court also agreed that Meyer had not sufficiently pleaded his fraud claims under governing case law, ruling that Meyer’s complaint put forward only general, conclusory allegations that our client and a co-defendant knew or had any reason to know that the representations made about the “Rothko” at the time of the sale were false.  At the same time, however, the court remanded the matter to give Meyer a chance to plead any additional facts conceivably supporting a fraud claim.  But there were none.  And just last week Plaintiff agreed to dismiss his lawsuit once and for all, handing our client a total win and major vindication in the face of unsupported fraud claims that from day one we always argued were as stale as they were meritless.