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A part-time New York couple say $70,000 worth of their belongings were “intentionally left to rot” by a professional storage company — who didn’t inform them of the moldy, smelly damage until moving day, according to a new lawsuit.
Dennis and Ashleigh Ellis were floored to learn that their things, including furniture, clothing and even their wedding album, were “presumably” allowed to sit in standing water for months by Flat Rate Movers and Storage, according to Ashleigh and the couple’s Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit from Wednesday.
The pair, who primarily live in Los Angeles, said they were greeted with “the stench of rot” when the company dropped off their boxes at their new West End apartment on Dec. 19, the filing says.
“When the things arrived, they arrived completely moldy and damaged – just unrecognizable,” Ashleigh – a former competitive figure skater – told The Post. “We had a beautiful home that we loved. I remember seeing it for the first time and I just broke out into tears.”
She added, “I know it’s just material things but there were a lot of sentimental things too from our wedding, our wedding gifts, pieces of art that were commissioned – just priceless items that we will never get back.”
Ashleigh, who married her lawyer hubby in 2019, said some other sentimental items like their wedding album, family photos and a family tree book they received as a wedding gift were also ruined.
After refusing to accept the ruined belongings, the company, as well as the Ellises’ home insurance company State Farm, said they wouldn’t cover the damage.
The couple’s suit, which also names State Farm as a defendant, accuses Flat Rate of having the “audacity to show up at delivery with a truckload of moldy, damaged and destroyed property that had obviously been intentionally left to rot for months, yet acted as if nothing was wrong.”
Ashleigh slammed Flat Rate for not standing behind their word.
“You expect to hire a professional company and when they show up – the stuff is green and moldy and they are not trying to compensate us at all,” Ashleigh said.
Dennis – a partner at the firm handling his suit, Ellis George Cipollone – and Ashleigh decided to move Big Apple apartments since they had a 1-year-old son and needed more space to accommodate the bigger family.
“Now we have an empty house and we have no furniture,” Ashleigh said. “We don’t have a bed. I have an 18-month-old son but no crib.”
“This was Christmastime,” she said. “Everything is on back order. We are now just starting to get furniture. It was a nightmare.”
The company claimed that all of the Ellises’ things that it had been storing for eight months from their former Lincoln Center-area apartment were only worth $5,000 when it was actually worth $70,000, the filing claims.
Flat Rate also gave “every excuse under the sun” to get out of paying for the damage, telling the couple it wasn’t their fault and that “no one can control mother nature” while not admitting or explaining how the damage occurred, the filing alleges.
The Ellises paid Flat Rate $2,500 for the delivery of their belongings, in addition to $500 per month for storage since April 19, 2021. And the couple has been a faithful customer of State Farm since 2007, having paid the insurer roughly $500,000 in premiums, the suit claims.
“Flat Rate’s intentional destruction of the Ellis property by leaving it, presumably, exposed to or in standing water and moisture for months assuring that nothing could be salvaged constituted an intentional and unauthorized destruction and defacement of the Ellis Property akin to vandalism,” the suit charges.
Flat Rate lawyer David Giampietro told The Post that the company doesn’t comment on pending litigation but said, “we will say that this matter is stemming from the historic storm, Hurricane Ida.”
Ellis lawyer Jeffrey Mitchell told The Post that even if the late August storm was to blame for the damage, the company didn’t call the Ellises to tell them what had happened at the time, nor did it make any attempts to dry out and salvage their property.
“They didn’t pull any of it out, they didn’t call a remediation company to dry it out,” Mitchell said. “They took no effort to salvage anything that could be salvaged.”
“They just left it there in its condition to rot and then they delivered it to the customer and washed their hands of their responsibility,” the lawyer claimed.
State Farm didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
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