Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, has filed a $250,000 negligence lawsuit against the city of Rye, New York, and Consolidated Edison after she tripped and fell over a large wooden block protruding from a steel plate in a roadway. The steel plate had been covering excavation work for a Con Ed gas main project.
The incident occurred on Aug. 28 in Rye, Westchester County — just weeks after Pirro was confirmed as the Trump administration's top prosecutor in the nation's capital. According to the amended complaint filed Wednesday in state court, the 74-year-old was confined to bed and required medical attention following the fall.
The lawsuit presents a straightforward picture: a steel plate covering a utility excavation, a wooden block protruding from it, and a fall that injured Pirro, AP News reported. The complaint details specific harm:
As a result of defendants' negligence, Ms. Pirro sustained serious personal injuries, including but not limited to bruises and contusions to the head, eye, face, and shoulder areas, together with pain, discomfort, and limitation of movement.
An initial complaint was filed last month. The amended version landed on Wednesday, naming both the city of Rye and Con Ed as defendants.
Neither defendant appears eager to accept responsibility. An attorney for the city of Rye filed a motion to dismiss, arguing it:
can hardly be said that the City was negligent in a duty to pedestrians at a location that was not a pedestrian walkway.
That's one defense: the location wasn't meant for foot traffic, so the city owed no duty of care. Con Ed took a different tack. An attorney for the utility giant filed a separate motion seeking dismissal, claiming that all the dangers and risks related to the incident:
were open, obvious and apparent.
So one defendant says you shouldn't have been there. The other says you should have seen it coming. Between the two of them, neither wants to talk about the wooden block sticking out of the road.
There's an irony to the venue. Pirro is no stranger to Westchester County — she served as both a judge and the district attorney there before her years as a Fox News host and, now, her role as U.S. Attorney. If anyone knows Rye, it's her. That local familiarity cuts both ways in a case like this: it makes it harder for defendants to argue she was somewhere she had no business being, but it also invites the kind of "open and obvious" defense Con Ed is already mounting.
Representatives for Pirro, Con Ed, and the city of Rye all declined to comment on Thursday.
This is, at its core, a personal injury case — not a political one. But it lands in a political world. Pirro holds one of the most prominent prosecutorial roles in the country. Every headline with her name in it gets filtered through a partisan lens, whether the story warrants it or not.
What's worth noting is how ordinary the underlying facts are. Cities and utilities dig up roads, cover the holes with steel plates, and move on. When the work is sloppy — when a wooden block protrudes from a plate in a way that catches someone's foot — people get hurt. It happens thousands of times a year across the country. The question in any negligence suit is the same: did someone fail in their duty of care?
Rye says it had no duty because the location wasn't a pedestrian walkway. Con Ed says the hazard was obvious. The court will sort through those arguments. But the existence of a wooden block protruding from a steel plate on a public roadway is not in dispute. Someone put it there, and someone was responsible for making sure it didn't injure passersby — or at least for warning them.
That's the question the lawsuit asks. Whether the answer carries a $250,000 price tag is for a judge to decide.