‘I Was Blindsided!’: Black Florida Masseuse Sues Billionaire Former Boss for Trying to Kick Her Out of the Home She Says He Promised to Give Her
A Black woman who worked as a massage therapist and personal assistant to a billionaire in coastal South Florida is fighting in court to keep the home she says he promised to give her several years ago.
Fayssanya “Fay” Pratt, 50, a Bahamian American, claims that she once had a warm and friendly relationship with John Ferolito, a wealthy businessman who is the co-founder and former owner of AriZona Iced Tea.
She told Atlanta Black Star (ABS) that Ferolito, whom she worked for at his private residence in Hillsboro Beach near Boca Raton for 23 years, treated her and her family generously, surprising her with a brand-new Ford Tahoe after calling her car a clunker and paying for her son’s braces after noticing his crooked teeth. He also set up and funded an investment account for her and her children, depositing $160,000.
Pratt says she likewise took good care of Ferolito, whom she met when she was 25 and he was about 50, providing him with massages at his palatial waterfront home and on his yacht, cleaning and cooking for him, dog sitting, caddying, and at times managing his doctor appointments and medical care.
In 2017, after a flood damaged Pratt’s home where she lived with her three young children, Pratt asked Ferolito if he would assist her with buying a new home.
She contends that Ferolito offered instead to buy a home for her outright, giving her an initial budget of $400,000 to go house shopping with a real estate agent and promising to deed the property to her. Pratt claims this conversation occurred in the spa area of Ferolito’s residence while she was giving him a facial.
This oral agreement is at the center of her current legal dispute with Ferolito, who claims in his legal pleadings that he never said he would gift her the home, but offered to buy a home as an investment property and to let Pratt and her family live in it as long as she worked for him.
Ferolito claims that Pratt was responsible for paying the property taxes and maintaining the property in lieu of monthly rent, and that her tenancy was always contingent on her employment. After he fired her in 2023, his lawsuit says the agreement ended, and he ordered Pratt to move out.
Pratt, who refused to leave the home and still lives there with her children (now 12, 13, and 18), insists that Ferolito proudly told her and many others over the years that he had promised to give her the property, and that she agreed to pay for property taxes, maintenance, and costly repairs because their deal was always that the house would be hers.
No signed written agreement exists describing either alleged arrangement for ownership or occupancy, so the two litigants are relying on witness statements, documents and other evidence to prove their respective cases.
Since Ferolito purchased the four-bedroom, ranch style home in Coral Springs, Florida for $493,736 through a trust in his name in April 2018, Pratt told ABS she has invested close to $100,000 in the property, including property taxes from 2018 to 2021; expensive plumbing, flooring and roof repairs; new appliances; and renovations of the kitchen, bathrooms and garage, which now serves as an efficiency apartment.
Pratt earned an annual salary of $72,800 in her last year working for Ferolito, according to her deposition testimony.
Her answers and counterclaim to Ferolito’s 2023 lawsuit seeking her ejection from the property, filed in Broward County 17th Judicial Circuit Court, contend that his oral agreement to deed the property to her is enforceable under Florida law based on her years of possession, tax payments, improvements, services she provided to him outside of her job duties, and other acts of reliance on Ferolito’s promise.
Her counterclaim alleges a legal theory of primary estoppel, which allows a court to enforce a promise, even without a formal, written contract, if one party suffered a financial loss after reasonably relying on it.
Pratt’s countersuit also claims that she has developed a valid possessory interest and equitable rights in the property superior to Ferolito’s holding of the property title because of her years of reliance, service and expenditures.
She seeks a jury trial and demands a judgment awarding her title to the home, compensatory damages of at least $750,000 for her pecuniary losses and emotional distress, as well as punitive damages.
Pratt says she never had a disagreement with Ferolito, whom she and others who worked for him referred to as “Boss,” until September 2022, when she had a verbal argument with Ron Cohen, the CEO of his trust, over some landscaping work done on the Coral Springs property.
She said it was hurricane season in southern Florida, and she had some overgrown trees that needed trimming. Ferolito told her he would have his landscaping crew take care of it for her, as he had in the past. His general contractor, Andres Sinisterra, arranged for the crew to come and told them, “Whatever Fay needs, take care of it,” she says.
Unbeknownst to her, and without her authorization, she says, the landscapers did more than trim trees —— they also planted new fruit trees, and repaired and installed sprinklers, and sent a bill for $33,000 to Ferolito’s trust.
This apparently angered Cohen, who told Pratt she was taking advantage of Ferolito’s generosity and, she says, cussed her out during an angry phone call which she recorded.
Cohen in turn told Ferolito about the large landscaping expense and about the contentious call and claimed that Pratt had screamed at and insulted him, calling him a racist, while secretly recording their call.
Apparently, her alleged disrespectful conduct, surreptitious recording and claims of racism served as a breaking point for Ferolito. On Sept. 7, 2022, his executive assistant, Kelly Aldrich, called Pratt and told her he had fired her.
Pratt also recorded this phone call on her Ring doorbell video camera. A transcript of the call, filed in court, shows this exchange (and accurately aligns with an ABS review of the audio from the video recording submitted as evidence):
Aldrich: The boss asked me to call you. … And he is very upset the way that Ron was spoken to and ugh, hold on one second. … Hey.
Pratt: Yeah. I’m here, Kelly.
Aldrich: That was the boss again, and he has asked me to let you go. He said that we will sign the house over to you and pay for whatever he’s been doing for the rest of the year.
Pratt asserts that this exchange backs up her claim that Ferolito had always intended to sign over the deed to her and that his staff knew about it.
She also points to statements that real estate agent Berry Lamy recently made in a deposition this year, during which he said after showing Pratt 15 to 20 properties in 2018, and homing in on the one she wanted to buy, he talked to an accountant who worked for Ferolito, as well as to Cohen, who each confirmed that Ferolito was “purchasing the property for the benefit of Fay Pratt.”
But the blowup with Cohen, whom Pratt says was Ferolito’s “right-hand man,” led Ferolito to change his tune and renege on their longstanding agreement.
Pratt says she pleaded with his staff to talk Ferolito and explain the “misunderstanding,” but Ferolito refused to meet or talk with her on the phone afterwards.
Pratt also says she had a history of friction with Cohen, who had made derogatory, sexually explicit, and vulgar comments to her about her body over the years and also inappropriately touched her buttocks. Her original complaint included allegations of assault and sexual harassment against Cohen that the circuit court judge has since dismissed from the case and ordered her not to mention before a jury.
She contends that after Aldrich fired her over the phone, Aldrich repeatedly promised to send her the deed, but never did.
A full year later, on Sept. 10, 2023, Pratt got a phone call from Ferolito’s attorney, David Buss, advising her that Ferolito would no longer pay her $1,400 weekly severance wages or cover her children’s tutoring, and that she had six months to vacate the property.
“I was blindsided by that,” she says. Pratt adds, “I really thought he would do what he had promised. I held up my part of the deal.”
Pratt said she had never worried about a lack of a written agreement with Ferolito because he frequently operated off the cuff.
“I never signed anything with him. He’s a billionaire. He made all kinds of deals and purchases on a whim, often in cash. If he tells you he’s going to do something, he just did it, and that’s how he operated with me for twenty-something years.”
Ferolito, now 76, reportedly received a $1 billion judgment in a New York state court in 2014, resolving a thorny legal dispute with his co-founder of AriZona Iced Tea, Don Vultaggio, over the value of his 50 percent stake in the company. He has since started a new beverage company, St. James Iced Tea and owns (with Cohen) an upscale Italian restaurant in Boca Raton and an exclusive private golf resort in New Jersey.
In his motion for summary judgment filed on Sept. 14, Ferolito seeks a court order to eject Pratt from the home and to dismiss her counterclaims. He argues that he purchased the property, that Pratt contributed nothing towards the purchase price, and denies that he ever told her the property would be gifted to her.
To back up his claim that he only allowed her to occupy the property as a tenant, and that she paid for property taxes and maintenance in lieu of rent, he cites evidence including cashier’s checks that Pratt used to pay for the annual property taxes, which included handwritten memos such as “2019 RENT” and “Rent 2020.”
Pratt told ABS that she marked the tax checks that way “because he told me to. I never really understood why.”
Ferolito also references a written lease for the property from April 2018 that Pratt allegedly “declined to sign” before moving in, which provided for a month-to-month tenancy at $1.00 per month and required her to pay the real estate taxes, maintain the premises, and obtain his written consent before remodeling.
Pratt says she never signed such a lease because that was not her agreement with Ferolito, and her legal filings call the unsigned, proposed lease, which was not produced as evidence until July 2026, hearsay and inadmissible.
Ferolito’s motion also notes that Cohen, Aldrich and Buss have all attested that they never heard him promise Pratt that the house would be given or deeded to her.
Buss further testified, the plaintiff’s motion says, that in a phone call in September 2023, Pratt “asked whether she could purchase the property and offered to return the UBS investment account Mr. Ferolito had gifted her in exchange for the title. This was an offer she would not have made had she believed she already owned the Property or would receive it as a gift.”
Pratt denies this, countering that Buss contacted her with an offer to finance the house by cashing in her investment account and obtaining a loan — which Pratt said she couldn’t afford to do — and also tried to strongarm her into signing a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) in which she would promise not to sue anyone affiliated with Ferolito’s trust.
She believes that proposal was intended to ward off her sexual harassment claims against Cohen, as the statute of limitations in Florida on a sexual harassment claim in a civil suit is one year.
“You don’t want me around? Fine,” Pratt says she recalls thinking at the time. “You disrupt my whole life, try to change the agreement to make me buy a house you already told me is mine? And now you send an NDA and want to stop me from suing you and take everything I have? No way.”
Perhaps the key piece of evidence in the case is the Ring doorbell recording of Aldrich telling Pratt that Ferolito “said that we will sign the house over to you.”
Ferolito’s motion argues that the Ring recording will be inadmissible in court because Aldrich did not consent to being recorded before Pratt did so without telling her, which is barred by Florida law, making the entire phone conversation and its transcript, and “any questioning, impeachment, or argument drawn from it equally inadmissible.”
“Stripped of the recording and its fruits, Pratt is left with her own affidavit and deposition testimony,” the motion says, which “cannot overcome the [Ferolito] Trust’s record title.”
A hearing via Zoom before Judge Jeffrey Levenson on Ferolito’s motion for summary judgment is set for Nov. 23.
Pratt says her last in-person exchange with Ferolito, at his deposition in July, was bittersweet.
After he testified, once again denying he ever said he’d give her the house, her attorney asked Ferolito if he’d like to talk with Pratt privately to finally hear her side of things.
“No, I think it’s a little too late for that,” Ferolito allegedly replied.
But Pratt said Ferolito was cordial with her. When she entered the law office, “I said, ‘Hi, Boss, you look good,’ and he said, ‘You look good, too.’ (I’ve lost a lot of weight from the stress of this),” she says. “And he slid me a chocolate across the table. I looked up at him, and he winked at me, and I smiled, and then I dug in my purse, and I took out a Werther’s (caramel) and I slid it to him.
‘And we finally looked at each other, and he said, ‘We shouldn’t be here,’ and I said, ‘I know.’”
As they walked out of the deposition, Pratt says, Ferolito “was saying goodbye to everybody, and he said, ‘OK, Fay,’ and I looked at him, and I said, ‘OK, Boss, be well.’
“And he must have stood there for a minute because I turned around and he was looking at me, and he said, ‘What did you say?’ and I again said, “Boss, be well.’ He put out his hand to give me a pound, like a fist bump. And he left. And it’s just a very sad and hurtful situation,” Pratt recalled wistfully. “I knew him for half my life, and I never got a chance to tell him, ‘I never betrayed you. This is not what you think it is.’”