Hell hath no fury like a Sugar Daddy scorned. But shouldn’t the buyer beware?
Toronto lawyer Azmat Ramal-Shah claimed in a $226 million lawsuit that he was defrauded by his sugar baby and her Aurora parents, who let him spend $20,000 on the University of Ottawa student while she professed her love but told him all kinds of lies not to meet him in person, including an aunt’s funeral, a broken leg and a sudden cancer diagnosis.
According to his almost 150-page claim, the heartsick would-be lover alleged Kirsten Jones, now 25, and her parents, Michael and Colleen Jones, committed “fraud, defamation, interference with his economic interests and intentional infliction of emotional distress,” and despite his master’s degrees from prestigious Duke School of Law and Ivey School of Business, the saga has left him unable to get an appropriate high-paying job.
An Ontario judge wasn’t too sympathetic.
“The basis of Azmat’s claim against Kirsten is that she lied to him about not being able to meet with him on several occasions when she said her aunt had died, she said she had broken her leg, and finally that she had cancer for which she was receiving treatments. Kirsten acknowledges that she gave the above excuses to avoid meeting with Azmat and that they were not true. Azmat argues that these false representations caused him to continue to send money to her,” wrote Justice Robert Smith in a recent ruling.
“Azmat started a relationship on a ‘sugar daddies and sugar babies’ dating site and would have reasonably expected to make some payments to Kirsten. He was disappointed with the extent of their relationship and became obsessed with Kirsten when she ended their relationship.”
The family’s lawyer said they didn’t want to be interviewed. Ramal-Shah didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Smith said the pair — he was 30, she was 18 — met in 2016 on “Seeking Arrangement,” a dating website for sugar babies and sugar daddies. Or as the judge explained: “Sugar dating is also called sugaring, which is a transactional dating practice typically involving an elder wealthier person and a younger person who needs financial assistance.”
According to Kirsten, the transaction was straightforward: she’d provide friendship via phone, email, and text. In return, he’d agree to her requests for money to pay her bills, including rent, and let her use his Uber Eats and Uber accounts on a regular basis.
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In his lawsuit, Ramal-Shah claims there wasn’t much sugar with his baby: She told him that if he continued to send her “gifts,” she’d agree to meet in person, he alleges, but she always cancelled at the last minute, including leaving him waiting at an airport in North Carolina for a flight she never boarded. She later told him she was in the hospital after just being diagnosed with bone cancer.
According to the ruling, Kirsten said her sugar daddy became possessive at the beginning of 2017, grilling her on who she was seeing, threatening to ruin her reputation and calling her a “whore.” To get out of meeting him, she admitted lying about breaking her leg and having cancer. By March 2018, she broke off all contact but he wouldn’t accept the end of their relationship.
Ramal-Shah began emailing her parents — who until then, didn’t know about their daughter’s sugaring — and then their clients and friends with allegations that he’d been scammed, the judge said. Colleen Jones hired a lawyer who sent seven cease-and-desist letters; instead of complying, he just mocked him as a “shopping mall lawyer.”
In August 2018, Ramal-Shah emailed Kirsten’s mom: “So offer me a settlement, and we can keep this out of the courts.”
But he didn’t file his threatened lawsuit until December 2021, more than three years later. You’d think a well-educated lawyer would know his claim came too late to succeed.
Ramal-Shah argued he brought his lawsuit in time because he didn’t discover the material facts to support his claim until the year he filed his lawsuit. The judge disagreed and ruled the two-year limitation period had expired. Smith threw the case out and ordered Ramal-Shah to pay the Jones family $15,000 of their legal costs.
And that’s not the end of the lawyer’s bad sugar rush. Ramal-Shah is awaiting a decision from the Law Society Tribunal on allegations of professional misconduct in how he dealt with his lawsuit.
mmandel@postmedia.com
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