Stag party strip club financial disaster gets a happy ending

The Spearmint Rhino Club
The Spearmint Rhino Club



Stag parties are meant to go slightly awry. Half the fun is waking up with one eyebrow, wondering exactly what you got up to the night before. However, there's a difference between 'slightly awry', and 'disastrously wrong' and it's a difference that Gil David, a 34-year-old from Portstewart in Northern Ireland, is unfortunately very familiar with.

He went to Bournemouth for a friend's stag party, and woke up to discover that not only had he been to strip club Spearmint Rhino, but he had also consumed 30 alcoholic drinks, and in his drunken state, had spent an astonishing £7,000 on girls and booze. That's a third of his annual salary. Among the incredible bills he ran up was £1,800 in tips for the strippers.

According to The Sun, since the event took place in August 2013, he has argued that the club took advantage of him when he wasn't in control of his faculties. He said he was drunk when he arrived at the club, but they continued to ply him with alcohol and take his cash.

He had been to the police, trading standards and his credit card company, and they had all told him there was nothing they could do to help. The Bournemouth Echo reported that he was backed by a local councillor in 2014, but he was unable to get the club to refund the money. In the end, he took the case to the Central London County Court.

The Mirror reported that the club's argument was that he had willingly signed off on the payments, and paid for 'entertainment' - including time alone with two strippers.

However, when the Judge said there might be no clear winner in the case, the strip club agreed to settle. It did not admit any wrongdoing.

Drunk purchases

Buyer's remorse the morning after a drunken spending spree is not unusual. We reported back in June on the man who had left a $1,088 tip on his $60 bill after a late night Thai Meal in Colorado. He went back the following morning to explain that instead of paying the bill he had just handed over all his money, and luckily for him the restaurant owner had feared as much, and hadn't distributed the tip to staff.

A study by Confused.com has found that the average we spend when drunk shopping online is £142. Most of our drunk shopping is on Amazon, but almost one in five people have booked a holiday after a drink, and 6% have splashed out on a new TV. It also asked people for their most unusual drunk purchases - and answers included the person who bought ten lobster pots, a pie maker, diving equipment and a folding ladder.

When the expense is relatively minor, and the purchase useful, most people decide to live with their mistake. However, with a bill of £7,000 you can see why David wasn't happy to take this approach.

Legally there's an argument that a contract made under the influence of alcohol where one party has been taken advantage of is unenforceable. However, the courts would have to be satisfied that he had entirely lost the ability to consent to the services he was receiving. It's the difficulty of proving or disproving this that makes a case like this one hard to decide.

A settlement at least avoided a prolonged and expensive legal argument - and finally brought a happy ending for David

But what do you think? Should there be a get-out clause for drunken purchases? Let us know in the comments.

Weird Things Guys Do When They're Drunk
Weird Things Guys Do When They're Drunk


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