Lawsuit: Amesty claimed opponent bilked Social Security, tried to get her son fired
A former legislative aide has accused state Rep. Carolina Amesty of urging his employer to fire him and claiming his mother – one of Amesty’s primary opponents in 2022 – exploited the Social Security system, according to a complaint filed this week in Leon County Circuit Court.
The former aide, Nicolas Frevola, filed a defamation lawsuit against Amesty in September, claiming Amesty falsely accused him of trying to run her over with a car two years ago as she and Frevola’s mother vied for the Republican party’s nomination in the competitive Florida House race. Amesty has denied that allegation.
The amended complaint filed this week expands on those claims, accusing Amesty of engaging in a “one-way mudslinging campaign,” against her Republican opponents, including Frevola’s mother, Janet Frevola.
Amesty responded to questions about the matter from the Orlando Sentinel on Wednesday in an email sent through her attorney, Paul Thanasides of Tampa.
“To be clear, this sweeping, vague allegation is untrue,” the emailed response said of the mudslinging allegation.
Nicolas Frevola was an aide to former state Rep. Scott Plakon in 2022, and the suit alleges that Plakon called to tell him that Amesty had demanded that Plakon fire Frevola for “engaging in inappropriate actions” toward her and her campaign staff.
But Plakon said Wednesday that Amesty did not urge him to fire Frevola. Though Plakon said he served as an “unofficial political consultant” to Amesty and several other new candidates in 2022, he would not say if Amesty had ever discussed Frevola with him.
Frevola, 26, is no longer working for the Florida House, his attorney, Cindy Myers, said Wednesday.
Amesty defeated Janet Frevola and three other Republicans in the August 2022 primary before going on to win her District 45 seat, which covers Windermere, other west Orange County communities and a northern slice of Osceola County.
A first-term lawmaker, Amesty was the subject of an Orlando Sentinel investigation last year that documented unpaid taxes on the home where she lived, misleading assertions about her businesses and false claims on the website for her family’s small university.
Earlier this month, Amesty resisted requests in a court filing from Frevola’s attorneys to turn over text messages, emails and other communications with Florida House Speaker Paul Renner, another lawmaker and state House employees. Amesty’s attorneys argued she was acting as a state House member and should be immune from the suit, including the discovery process.
According to Frevola’s amended complaint, Amesty told a crowd at an Osceola County Republican Executive Committee meeting in April 2022 that Janet Frevola was fraudulently “living off of Social Security disability.”
Janet Frevola was not present at the meeting, but the suit says several people who attended told her about Amesty’s alleged comments. A former law enforcement officer who was injured in the line of duty, Frevola receives disability benefits, her son’s suit says.
Through her attorney, Amesty denied making the comments and said the accusation was unrelated to Nicolas Frevola’s suit, as the allegation did not pertain to him.
The new complaint also says Amesty claimed the homeowner’s association at the guarded community where she was living with her parents during the 2022 election, and where Janet Frevola and her husband live, revoked Amesty’s gate pass needed to enter the development.
She claimed that members of Frevola’s family had denied her access to the community as an act of retribution, the complaint alleges. Janet Frevola confirmed Wednesday that her husband was on the homeowner’s association board, but said any action taken against Amesty wasn’t politically motivated.
Rather, the association board decided to confront Amesty after several residents had complained about her driving vehicles sporting campaign ads and planting yard signs in “forbidden” areas of the exclusive Keene’s Pointe neighborhood, the complaint alleges.
In response to the Sentinel’s questions, Thanasides said Amesty doesn’t think she planted signs in any community areas and asked why the newspaper was inquiring about the matter.
“If Rep. Amesty or campaign staff inadvertently drove a car with a campaign wrap to her father’s house in violation of some technical HOA rule, is that a newsworthy allegation?” Thanasides wrote. “What if her father went on vacation and accidentally let his grass grow an inch too tall? Do you report on every minor mistake people make (like every human being) in their daily lives or is it only Rep. Amesty that you scrutinize in this way?”
Nicolas Frevola also has a lawsuit outstanding against another lawmaker, Republican Rep. Fabian Basabe of Miami Beach. Frevola, a former aide for Basabe, and Jacob Cutbirth, a former intern in Basabe’s office, filed a lawsuit against Basabe last July, accusing him of sexual harassment, unwanted touching, making lewd comments, showing them a photo of a naked man on his phone and slapping Frevola.
A week later they also filed a complaint against Basabe with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Miami Herald reported.
Basabe has denied the accusations leveled against him by Frevola, whose employment he described as a “mountain of disappointment.” Writing on X, formerly Twitter, Basabe said that a House investigation into the alleged slapping incident had been concluded “rightly in my favor.”
But the investigation by an outside law firm was “inconclusive,” according to the Miami New Times, which published a copy of it because it failed to determine what happened because of conflicting accounts and “a lack of corroborating witnesses.”
