Long Island strip club owner sues Gov. Andrew Cuomo over business closures
The owner of a Long Island jiggle joint was stripped of his constitutional right to put skin on display thanks to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s coronavirus shutdown, a new lawsuit claims.
Sean McCarthy, who’s run the Blush Gentleman’s Club in Commack since 1997, filed suit against Cuomo over his executive orders shuttering non-essential businesses amid the pandemic.
“Governor Cuomo is engaged in a huge overstep of executive power,” said Joe Murray, an attorney for McCarthy. “He is infringing on people’s fundamental civil rights far beyond the least restrictive means allowable under the constitution.
“Someone should remind him he is the governor and not the king.”
The governor’s orders “constituted a breach of constitutional duty” and have caused McCarthy “immediate and irreparable harm and actual and undue hardship,” claims the federal lawsuit, filed Saturday by Murray and Peter Crusco in the Eastern District of New York.
The nudie bar boss says his business can run safely through social distancing and “strict hygiene” by staff, but that the orders “do not even permit the attempt to do so.”
McCarthy is also taking the feds and the Small Business Administration to court for denying his and other strip clubs funds from the federal coronavirus stimulus bill.
Sex-related businesses are not eligible for loans from the Paycheck Protection Program, depriving McCarthy of “the most effective way to continue [his] business and exercise [his] right to free speech,” according to the filing.
“In times of crises such as these, it is particularly discriminatory in that certain businesses will continue and others who deal with subjects the Government does not favor… will be dealt the hand of business death, aces and eights,” the documents state.
McCarthy is requesting a jury trial and at least $150,000 in damages and attorneys costs and fees.
Neither Cuomo nor the SBA immediately returned a request for comment.
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