LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — A California man staying at a Las Vegas Strip resort over the 2023 Christmas holiday said he awoke one morning to excruciating pain in his groin area.
“I just felt like somebody stabbing me in my private area,” Michael Farchi, of Agora Hills, told Nexstar’s KLAS in March. “It felt like a sharp glass or a knife.”
Upon investigation, Farchi said he found the source of the pain.
“I went to the restroom, and I saw a scorpion hanging on my underwear,” Farchi said of the Dec. 26 incident. He and his family checked out the next day, a day earlier than planned. The hotel, the Venetian Resort Las Vegas, compensated him for his room.
“He felt multiple additional stinging sensations on his hand and groin area,” according to a lawsuit recently filed on behalf of Farchi and his wife, Batia.
Since the incident, the 62-year-old said the poisonous sting to his testicles has caused him to suffer PTSD and emotional trauma for which he continues to seek treatment. The incident has had ramifications on Farchi’s sex life, the lawsuit stated.
“I can also indicate, as you saw in the complaint, we’re also making a claim for loss of consortium for Mr. Farchi’s wife,” said Brian Virag of “My Bed Bug Lawyer,” one of Farchi’s California attorneys.
“Consortium” means that Farchi’s wife is making legal claims that their sex life hasn’t been the same since the sting.
According to court documents filed on Aug. 27, the hotel “owed a duty of care to Plaintiffs to provide a clean, safe, and sanitary room . . . that was free of vermin, bed bugs, or similar things, including scorpions.”
Farchi shared with KLAS photos of the scorpion hanging on his underwear.
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A photo purportedly shows the scorpion that stung Michael Farchi during his stay at a Las Vegas Strip resort during the holiday season in 2023 | Photo provided by Brian Virag -
A photo purportedly shows the scorpion that stung Michael Farchi during his stay at a Las Vegas Strip resort during the holiday season in 2023 | Photo provided by Brian Virag -
A photo purportedly shows the scorpion that stung Michael Farchi during his stay at a Las Vegas Strip resort during the holiday season in 2023 | Photo provided by Brian Virag
“It really doesn’t matter, so much, how it got there,” Virag said. “The fact that it was there, and they were on notice that there were prior issues of scorpions at the subject property, that’s obviously the main point here.”
In his lawsuit, Farchi claims that the Venetian Resort had prior knowledge of an “infestation of poisonous, deadly scorpions.”
“From our understanding, there was some ongoing construction at the time that this incident happened — just before the incident happened and the time the incident happened,” Virag said.
Farchi shared a medical incident report with KLAS that he filed at the Palazzo on Dec. 26. It showed his suite number and what he wrote to hotel staff that night: “bitten by scorpion on my groin/testicles.”
Farchi said the hotel staff didn’t take him seriously.
“(They were) just holding their groin area and laughing about it,” he said. “It was really embarrassing.”
Farchi went to Summerlin Hospital and was diagnosed with “poisoning: scorpion sting,” according to the lawsuit. He was also treated at UCLA Medical Center, where doctors confirmed he was suffering from physical injuries, including erectile dysfunction, as a result of the sting, the lawsuit added.
“Many effects on my family, my work, everything,” Farchi said in an interview with KLAS.
Farchi wants a jury trial, according to the lawsuit, to assess damages for past and future medical expenses, pain and suffering, mental distress, anguish, loss of companionship and support, and loss of enjoyment of life.
KLAS reached out to the Venetian Resort for comment on Thursday but did not receive a response.
When KLAS first reported on the incident in March, officials from the resort said it “has protocols for all incidents and we can confirm they were followed in this incident.”