Whipped Cream Difficulties

That was a comment from a friend of mine when I sent this story around last month.

I didn’t blog it at the time because it was all rumors and I had no reliable or semi-reliable sourcing on it. But ESPN published an article over the weekend, so now it can be blogged.

Jeff Banks, who is an assistant coach at UT, and his girlfriend are being sued.

Why?

Their monkey allegedly bit a child.

According to the lawsuit, the child, identified as C.C., was trick-or-treating with two friends on Halloween and was invited to attend a haunted house. The lawsuit says that, after completing the haunted house, the child and his friends were taken to a monkey that Thomas kept in the backyard. According to the complaint, the child was told the monkey was trained to give high-fives.
“Instead of giving a high five, Danielle Thomas’s monkey aggressively bit down on C.C.’s hand and refused to let go,” says the lawsuit, a copy of which was obtained by ESPN on Saturday. “C.C. was forced to manually pry the monkey’s jaw open. There was so much blood that C.C. was unable to see the full extent of the injury.”

…

According to the lawsuit, “Instead of showing any semblance of care for an injured child, Danielle Thomas was instead worried about the risk of her monkey being taken away. … Danielle Thomas stated to the physician that the monkey had bitten her before and that she was fine, implying that the monkey therefore did not have rabies.”

The family claims that Ms. Thomas has not yet provided vaccination records for the monkey. It isn’t clear from the article if C.C. had to go through the whole series of rabies shots.

Interesting side note:

Thomas is also identified as “Pole Assassin” in the lawsuit, her stage name as a dancer. She once appeared on “The Jerry Springer Show” with the monkey.