Man sues ex-mother-in-law for $1m

A Staten Island man says he had the mother of all monster-in-laws. Mohammad Shoman, 29, says the Brooklyn busybody was so determined to humiliate him that she obtained his confidential medical records to find out whether he was shooting blanks in the bedroom, and then spread lies that he was sterile and had an STD. And people believed her, even his wife. Shoman, 29, and his wife, Suha, 19, were having trouble getting pregnant, so on Nov. 16, 2010, Shoman went for tests at Lutheran Medical Center.



Shortly after, Suha’s mother, Samira Abuzahrieh, 45, somehow persuaded staffers at the Brooklyn hospital to hand over Shoman’s records, he alleges in his $2 million lawsuit against Abuzahrieh and the hospital. She then spread a host of lies, including that Shoman couldn’t put a bun in Suha’s oven and that he had enough diseases to be a one-man plague, including leukemia and a bone ailment, and would be dead in a few months, according to papers filed in Brooklyn Supreme Court. Shoman, a Walgreens store manager, “has never been diagnosed with leukemia . . . never been diagnosed with venereal disease . . . has never been diagnosed with bone disease,” his suit says.

This summer, Shoman was found to be fertile, but he says the damage from Abuzahrieh’s rumour-mongering had already been done. The gossipy momzilla made life so miserable for the Palestinian couple, who had been introduced through their families, that they divorced last year after just 14 months of marriage. But Shoman says he’s lost more than his wife. He says in court papers that he’s “been disgraced in his Muslim community.”



And he wants someone to pay. He’s demanding a million from Lutheran Medical Center for releasing his records and another million from his ex-in-law, whose gum-flapping was “for the sole purposes of humiliating Shoman,” the suit says. Not true, swears Abuzahrieh, who denied fishing for Shoman’s medical records. If he’s looking for a blabbermouth to blame, he should look to his own flesh and blood, the Bay Ridge woman charges. “His family said he can’t get kids,” she said. Abuzahrieh said she had no problem with Shoman, but her daughter decided to leave the marriage in part because “she can’t live with somebody who can’t get kids.”