Lawsuit targets St. Louis-based Luxco after student suffers serious burns from Everclear

Last May, a law student from Hong Kong was at one of her first parties in the U.S. when something terrible happened. Yvette Yuri Lanuza Digan was at the Zeta Psi house affiliated with Worcester Polytechnic Institute when one of the frat brothers poured Everclear into a fire burning in the yard. 

The result was catastrophic. ”An enormous fireball erupted,” enveloping the 22-year-old and “igniting her clothing, causing severe, life-altering burn injuries to substantial portions of her body,” Digan’s lawyer would later write. (You can see the sudden eruption in a video linked in court files.) Digan was rushed by ambulance to the hospital and then by helicopter to a bigger hospital, where she endured multiple surgeries and other procedures. That lawyer, Adam Clermont, says Digan suffered burns over 30 percent of her body.

Clermont sued the fraternity, and the brother who poured the alcohol into the fire. But within a few months, he also filed a second lawsuit, this one against Luxco, Inc., the St. Louis-based company behind brands such as Pearl Vodka, Saint Brendan’s Irish Cream, and Everclear. 

Reached for comment, a Luxco spokesperson said the company does not comment on pending litigation.

Everclear is something of an outlier among Luxco’s offerings. It’s 190 proof grain alcohol, a brand so notorious in the 1990s that its name became synonymous with high alcohol content. It even inspired an alt-rock band name, with lead singer Art Alexakis saying, “I liked the dichotomy [of] Everclear, that it looks like water but it’s really just pure evil… I liked that dichotomy of looking innocent but packing a punch.” Its original formulation has been banned in multiple states (neither Massachusetts nor Missouri are among them). 

Clermont’s focus, though, isn’t the intoxicating effects that titillated ‘90s college kids, but rather Everclear’s potential to turn a fire into a fireball. By digging through court records and media coverage, he says he’s become aware of nine serious injuries that resulted in the past 10 months from the combination of Everclear and flames. At 190 proof, he says, Everclear is basically gasoline.

“This has happened time and time again,” he says. “And instead of saying, ‘Hey, yeah, we got a problem here, let’s do something about it,’ they attack me. They attack my client.” 

As Clermont tells it, for years, Everclear was sold with a prominent warning label, urging people not to apply it near an open flame and to keep it from fire. In 2018, a redesign of the label left it with a much smaller warning, one that stated simply, “Warning: Flammable liquid. Handle with care.” Luxco also began marketing it for use in craft cocktails and a host of other products, such as DIY disinfectant wipes and DIY perfume with the tagline “make it your own.” To Clermont’s shock, they also collaborated with chefs to show how it could be used in cooking—including James Beard Award winner Kevin Nashan, who shot a video showing it being lit on fire for his version of cherries jubilee. Says Clermont, “They’re obviously paying these influencers to market this stuff next to flames!”

The lawsuit Clermont filed on behalf of Digan asks for damages, but it also asks that Luxco be required to restore Everclear’s “explicit front-label warnings” and that it stop “all marketing activities that suggest or depict the product being used near open flames or as a fuel.” He wants the judge to ban its sale in Massachusetts until that happens—an unusual request for federal court, but one that Clermont insists is the family’s main priority. 

“I have to make a demand as a lawyer, but I can tell you, this family, the money is not the primary concern with these people,” he says. “They can’t imagine another family would have to go through this, and they’re really, really mad because on at least three other occasions this could have been stopped.” 

One of those occasions, he says, happened in Binghamton, New York last December, when the fire department responded to a local bar after receiving reports that a flaming drink had caused a fireball to erupt. A college softball player named McKenna DeMoney was left with severe burns. According to a lawsuit DeMoney filed against the bartender, he’d filled a line of shots with Everclear before lighting them on fire. 

In its response to Clermont’s lawsuit, Luxco has alleged that the lawsuit filed by Clermont is legally deficient in numerous ways. Among other things, its lawyers argue that Digan doesn’t have standing to pursue the suit since it was another person, not the company, that poured Everclear into the fire at the Zeta Psi house. They also note that she can’t argue that she is likely to suffer a similar injury—legal elements necessary for the kind of suit filed by Clermont, even if an argument that’s unlikely to prevail in the court of public opinion.

Clermont says Digan spent some time in the hospital and continues to work on her recovery even today. It’s not clear, he says, how her injuries will affect her future (in addition to enrolling in law school, she was a talented musician). He says, “She’s doing the best you can.”