Susan Bailey v. Frantz Jewelers, et al.

Editor’s Note: Reader’s discretion is advised because I find this case to be truly heinous, and it’s kind of long. Rj)

It is every jeweler’s nightmare. The customer believes they have been wronged by something they perceive the jewelry store did to them. Plus, it just so happens that the customer has a good friend who is an attorney, and the attorney says: “Hey, let’s make those crooks pay”! The ensuing litigation costs the jeweler their reputation and most of their life savings over what turns out to be a completely false allegation. Such is the case of Susan Bailey v. Frantz Jewelers, Case No. CL23000232-00 of the Circuit Court of Roanoke County, Commonwealth of Virginia. This is the condensed story of that case from Frantz Jewelers’ expert witness’s (me) point of view.

The Players

Over the years, I have taken a lot of incoming rounds because I name names when I point out problems in the industry. Even though this was a full jury trial that went to verdict, and it is on the public record, I am still going to change a couple of names here just so I do not get another threatening letter from yet another saber-rattling lawyer.

The Plaintiff

The Plaintiff is Susan Bailey, a rich socialite real estate agent from the area around Roanoke, VA. She had been a customer of Frantz Jewelers for many years and, by all reports, is a lovely lady…with an attorney friend.

Plaintiff’s Attorney

Representing the plaintiff is a young lady who is an employment attorney who apparently watched too many episodes of Perry Mason and dreamed of being a litigation attorney. She was about as qualified as a litigator as Jabba the Hutt would be in running a foot race, so we will just call her Jabba.

Plaintiff’s Expert Witness

The plaintiff’s expert witness is a hugely famous and highly paid expert with many pages of appraisal organization credentials as part of his curriculum vitae. He seemed to think his very presence in the courtroom would cause the jurors to swoon at his feet and throw their panties on the witness stand. So, we will call him Elvis.

The Defendant

Frantz Jewelers has a long-standing reputation for quality and high ethics. Owner, Sherry Frantz, is considered one of the leaders in this industry. I consider Frantz Jewelers to be one of the finest in the country. We will call her, Sherry.

Defendant’s Attorney

Attorney Joe Piasta is a United States Army veteran who became a lawyer. Like all really good litigation attorneys, somewhere in his ancestry, he has direct DNA linkage to Attila the Hun, with the fighting spirit and tactical skills of General George Patton. All the while he is just a regular guy to work with. So, we will indeed call him, Joe.

Defendant’s Expert Witness

As an expert witness, I have been called many names over the years. At the end of this trial, Attorney Joe referred to me as the Iceman. I like that one. You will understand why that particular name as you read this story.

The Facts of the Case

In 2018, Frantz Jewelers sold an earth-mined 3.15 carat Princess cut diamond to Plaintiff Susan Bailey. In 2022, Bailey went to get this ring appraised for insurance coverage. During this examination, the appraiser found that the ring no longer contained a natural 3.15 carat Princess cut diamond in her ring, but instead contained a 2.09 carat Princess cut lab-grown diamond. The diamond was even laser engraved on the girdle with the words Lab Grown and the IGI grading certificate number.

Bailey immediately accused Frantz Jewelers of ripping her off. She accused Frantz Jewelers of switching the diamond in 2018 before they delivered the ring to her. She went as far as to contact the police but stopped short of filing a formal police report. However, she went about town telling people that Frantz Jewelers (in my words, not hers) was a crook.

Shortly after this, Bailey’s friend Jabba the Hutt came into the picture. Jabba apparently saw her opportunity to finally become a litigation attorney against a jeweler she thought had deep financial pockets. Jabba talked Bailey into filing a lawsuit against Frantz Jewelers and even took the case on a contingency basis, meaning she got paid only if she won.

This is where the players all came together. From retainer to trial, here is how the case progressed. The two sides retained expert witnesses to prove their respective sides of the case. Plaintiff Bailey hired Elvis; Defendant Frantz hired Iceman. It was now a battle of the Expert Witnesses.

Elvis’s Expert Witness Report

Elvis’s report spent a lot of time talking about Elvis. All of the tools he had, all of the years he had as an expert witness, all of his positions on various committees with various appraisal organizations. Elvis really went all out to tell us about Elvis. This is all pretty much par for the course for an expert witness with a very shaky case. But what came next was completely unexpected. Elvis compared the photograph of the ring taken by the appraiser in 2022 and the photograph from Frantz Jewelers from 2018 and claimed to be able to overlay those two photographs and measure the diamonds out to 100th of a millimeter based on the photographs. That was convoluted. Let me see if I can simplify it. Elvis stated that he could measure the diamonds in two photographs taken four years apart and accurately compare measurements of the two diamonds out to one-hundredth of a millimeter by measuring the pictures, proving the diamonds in the two photographs were the same diamond. No, that still sounds absurd. In truth, there is no way to make this sound logical or viable. But that was the crux of the report. Elvis had to reissue his report three times due to ongoing mathematical errors that also came out at trial. At US$400.00 per hour, Elvis’ expert witness report was pretty much a train wreck.

Iceman’s Expert Witness Report

Having worked with the Special Investigations Unit at USAA Insurance, I learned investigative techniques from several retired FBI and US Secret Service agents who worked there. They taught me that to be a good investigator, you needed to know some basic Latin and the Law of Parsimony, otherwise known as Occam’s Razor.

Applying these principles brought me to four main points about this case that comprised my report.

Lack of a formal Police Report. As a Property and Casualty Insurance Adjuster, anytime someone claims a loss based on someone else’s malicious intent, the first thing I always ask for and require is a police report. Filing a false police report on a crime can become a state jail felony. Insurance adjusters can weed out false claims by requiring a formal police report because people who are faking the claim usually will not want to file that report. In the case of Susan Bailey, she was going around town accusing Frantz Jewelers of fraud, and she actually called the police and talked to them, but she never filed a formal police report. If she felt that she had been defrauded of over $30,000, why would she not put her signature to a formal police report? This is where Occam’s Razor came into play. The simplest explanation is most often the most accurate explanation. Susan Bailey was not telling the truth on some level or was not sure that France Jewelers was, in fact, guilty, which I believe is why she would not sign a formal police report.
The 2.09 carat Princess cut diamond. The diamond was set crooked in the head and not set in the original seats cut into the prong to hold the original diamond. And more than anything else, it was engraved on the girdle as Lab Created with an I GI certificate number that could easily be looked up on the Internet to confirm that this was a 2.09 carat lab created diamond. It made no sense that a major retail jeweler would be so haphazard as to switch a diamond that was one carat less in weight than the one that was sold. Set it crooked in the ring. Set it fast where it was not in the original seats cut into the prongs. And put a diamond in that was clearly labeled Lab Created when in fact the diamond that was sold was an AGS certified 3.15 carat earth-mined diamond. Also, Frantz Jewelers has no Goldsmith on site. They had to send the diamond and the ring out to be set. The diamond in the ring now was haphazardly set, and it was done very quickly. It just did not add up.
The third point involved Latin. “Res ipsa loquitur.” The thing will indeed speak for itself. The thing that caught my eye was the photograph taken by the appraiser in 2022. Bailey claimed that the ring had been on her finger the whole four years and there was no chance that anybody else could have switched the stone. But the appraiser’s photograph showed prong tips that were mirror-finished. The rest of the ring showed a lot of wear and tear from being worn a lot of years, but the prong tips were pristine. This said one thing: Someone with knowledge and the tools had polished these prongs at some point in time in the very recent past. Someone who had access to this ring could have switched this stone because Princess cut diamonds set in four-prong settings can be taken out very easily and very quickly. With a mirror-like finish, these highly polished prong tips spoke for themselves. Res ipsa loquitur.
Finally, was Bailey’s pleasure trip to Antwerp, Belgium. Court documents contained emails from Bailey talking about her going diamond shopping in the diamond district of Antwerp and as she said, “bothering people.” Antwerp has a serious public relations problem with the tourism industry. There have been many reports of people shopping in the diamond stores there, and someone behind the counter will say “oh, you are wearing such a pretty ring. Let me clean it for you.” It only takes a couple of minutes. They take it back and take it to a ring cleaner and they bring it back and it looks all brand new again. The problem is, it is not the same diamond. Someone with the right tools and a good diamond inventory can switch a diamond out within a minute or two. We proved that with videos at trial, but we will talk about that later. The key element here was simply that Bailey’s ring now held a diamond that had been set very quickly and very haphazardly. And it showed a certificate number engraved into the girdle of a ring that had been certified by the International Gemological Institute in Antwerp the previous year from her trip to Antwerp. Trip to Antwerp. Diamond from Antwerp. Diamond haphazardly set. Occam’s Razor.

The Trial

Elvis on the Stand

It is common practice in courtrooms that witnesses are not allowed in the courtroom before they testify. The purpose is to not taint the testimony of witnesses by hearing what other witnesses have said. However, in Virginia it is allowed that one expert witness can sit in the courtroom while another expert witness testifies. Therefore, Joe called me at the hotel and told me to get my suit on and get down there so I could hear Elvis testify. I did not get to hear all of it, but I got in for the last 45 minutes or an hour, and it was quite amazing. I was later told that Jabba the Hutt spent over 45 minutes just going over Elvis’s credentials. I knew this had to be true because when I got in the courtroom, the jury had an absolute glaze over their eyes from boredom. Juries are just common people and they really do not care about somebody’s ego wall and how many certificates they have hung on it. They just want to hear the elements of the case, render a verdict, and go home. Elvis was grilled about why he had to issue his report three times because of errors. He used that time to remind everyone of his credentials and how long he had been an expert witness, which did not help the case.

Iceman on the Stand

I was called in to testify the next day. Two days before I was supposed to leave to go to Virginia, I had a massive flare-up of a combination of gout and arthritis in my right hand. It hurt to even move it or touch it. In spite of the pain I had to show up or totally screw up the whole trial. I had to laugh a bit because I thought, here I was, the expert witness for the defendant, and I was going to show up and hardly be able to button my shirt or tie my tie. But I walked into court, and when asked to raise my right hand to swear to tell the truth, I raised my paw, covered in an Ace bandage. It got a smile from most of those in the courtroom, which I knew was an excellent start despite the reason.

Courtrooms in Virginia are unlike anything that I have experienced. The witness stand is in the middle of the room, facing the judge, with the jury facing the witness, sitting in between the judge and the witness. So as a witness, you are sitting face to face with the jury, with the judge sitting behind them. It is probably intimidating to some, but to me it was simply another classroom. In his pretrial preparations for me, Joe explained that being an expert witness was actually being a teacher to the jury. Brilliant! That was something I could understand and it worked well.

We spent all of about 3 minutes on my credentials. The jury knew if I was sitting in that chair, I must know what I was talking about and all of my credentials were available in the court documents, so why bother? Being an expert witness at trial is not the time to let your ego get in the way. Joe threw me softball questions that allowed me to explain my report to the jury in a simple conversational manner. I had them nodding their heads when I nodded my head and smiling when I smiled. I knew we were doing ok at this point. (this was not my first rodeo).

Next, it was Jabba the Hutt’s turn for cross-examination. It was brutal for her. She would ask me a question, looking for a yes or no answer, and then give me as much time as I wanted to explain why her question was irrelevant. I have never experienced that from a litigation attorney in a trial. Typically, if an expert witness goes outside what is specifically asked of them by the opposing attorney, they get totally shut down. This was not the case at this trial. This is the first time in 40 years of doing that an opposing attorney has allowed me to control the narrative in cross-examination.

Finally, the cross-examination was over, and I was told I was excused. I did the one thing I always do when I am testifying. I looked at each section of the jury, I smiled, and mouthed the words “Thank you.” To a person, the jurors smiled back and said thank you back. I knew our Defendants entire team had hit this one out of the park.

Comes the Iceman

As soon as I was excused, I left the courthouse and went back to the hotel. The problem with my hand was getting worse and I just wanted to lay down. Shortly after 5:00 PM, I got a frantic call from Joe. “Robert, we have to get you to the hospital! You’ve got ice water in your veins”! It was Joe’s way of congratulating me for doing well in the stressful courtroom environment and controlling the narrative of Jabba the Hutt. When I told that story back home, I became the Iceman.

On my flight home the next day, I got a text message from Sherry Frantz telling me the jury verdict was already in. Frantz Jewelers prevailed on all counts, including a countersuit against Susan Bailey for slander, and was awarded damages.

Conclusion

I know I have made light of this a little bit because, quite honestly, I think this case was so absurd. Jabba the Hutt should never have talked Susan Bailey into bringing this case. It was found out later that Jabba did not inform Susan Bailey that if she lost the case, Bailey was going to have to pay a lot of money, both in Frantz’s legal fees and the damages awarded. That issue is still ongoing.

The real hero in this case is Sherry Frantz. I have not talked a lot about her in this report because I want Sherry to be able to tell her own story, as she could tell it far better than I could. A baseless, false allegation of fraud, for which she was totally innocent, cost Sherry over 2 years of stressful days and sleepless nights. This is in addition to being falsely accused within her community and having to pay well over $100,000 to prove her innocence. If she had settled this case, the general perception would be that she was guilty and settled to get out of it. So, she had no option but to fight this all the way through to the end. She is truly a warrior. I am honored to have been a part of this, even though I wish she had not had to go through it.

There is a lot more to this story. I never went into the deposition phase. Jabba the Hutt’s deposition of me was more like a high school debate team match than a professional litigation attorney in a litigation case, But that is another story for another time.

For all of you who have gone through this, you have my sympathies. For anyone who may go through this in the future, you have my contact information. Regardless of how frivolous the case is, if you do not fight it, it could end up putting you out of business, which is a sad testimony to our court system.

Thank you for reading my rendition of Susan Bailey v. Frantz Jewelers.

Sherry Frantz…..you are my hero. Now and forever!

The Iceman

Robert James FGA, GG
International School of Gemology
Global Claims Associates (home of the ISG)
Property and Casualty Adjuster, Texas Department of Insurance #1300433

PS: Due to surgery on my right hand, I had to dictate this newsletter through the computer. My apologies for any typos, but please blame Microsoft Word, as they have not yet perfected their system for Texican English.