Art world socialite Libbie Mugrabi’s lawyer moves to quit two of her lawsuits

A lawyer for Libbie Mugrabi has asked to walk away from two of her lawsuits within a day of each other, telling judges that his relationship with the New York art collector has hit a “total breakdown” and she has not paid her legal bills, court documents show.

The lawyer, Michael J. Regan of Regan & Associates, filed nearly identical sworn statements on August 7 and August 8 asking to be relieved as Mugrabi’s counsel in two separate New York County cases. A motion to be relieved as counsel is a request for a judge’s permission to quit representing a client before a case is over.

“Good cause exists to permit my withdrawal from representation in this action as a total breakdown in the attorney-client relationship has occurred,” Regan wrote in both filings.

“The client has rendered it unreasonably difficult for counsel to effectively carry out professional responsibilities, and the client has substantially failed to fulfill financial obligations regarding incurred legal fees and disbursements, despite repeated notice and opportunity to cure.”

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Court Documents: Lawsuits against Libbie Mugrabi

This page hosts the primary court records behind Urgent Matter’s reporting on Libbie Mugrabi.

Urgent MatterAdam Schrader

He is not the first of Mugrabi’s lawyers to leave. In November 2024, another attorney, Margaret Farid of Roy Farid, sent Mugrabi a letter resigning from all her legal matters at once and citing the same problem.

“I can no longer continue to serve as your attorney due to a serious breakdown in communication and several other factors that are integral to the effective and ethical practice of law,” Farid wrote on November 12, 2024, documents show.

The two withdrawals bracket a run of litigation. Mugrabi, the ex-wife of dealer David Mugrabi, is involved in several active New York cases.

These include a man’s claim she fabricated a gunpoint accusation and had him arrested, a defamation war with art lenders who took her Andy Warhol as collateral, the cartoonist Anthony Haden-Guest’s suit over 97 drawings, and a bank’s demand she pay a five-figure credit-card debt.

Mugrabi and her ex-husband were described in a June 2021 Tatler article as “the power couple of New York Society” until their “multimillion-dollar divorce” in December 2020, according to one of the complaints filed against her, which said the couple owned one of the world’s largest Warhol collections.

The oldest of the cases now costing her lawyers is one brought by Jacob H. Beam, an artist and photographer who says he worked as Mugrabi’s personal assistant and did design work for her clothing brand, Libbie.Love. Beam alleges that Mugrabi made false criminal accusations that got him arrested in a Manhattan hotel in May 2022.

According to Beam’s complaint, Mugrabi flew him from Bloomington, Indiana, to work at her Manhattan townhouse. She then flew into a rage on May 22, 2022, after finding a journal in which he had written about her.

“How dare you write about me,” she told him, according to the complaint. “You know I have a book deal with Simon and Schuster, and if you try to profit off my name I will send someone to shoot you through the head. Do you understand?”

The next day, Beam says, he was arrested in his room at Le Meridien Central Park. Police told him “a woman reported that you had held her at gunpoint and forced her to book this hotel room,” the complaint says. Beam says he never owned a gun, and that a co-worker who was with Mugrabi overheard her tell police to take her seriously because she was a rich woman.

Beam was charged with felony stalking involving a weapon, along with weapon-possession and menacing counts, and the charges were dismissed in September 2022, the complaint says. He is suing for what he describes as the fallout — arrest, prosecution and lasting anxiety and depression — and is asking for $1.2 million.

Mugrabi did not answer the suit in time. In October 2025, Justice Brendan T. Lantry entered a default judgment against her on liability, documents show. A default judgment is a loss that happens automatically when a party fails to respond. It settles that Mugrabi is liable but not how much she must pay, which the court will decide at a separate hearing called an inquest.

Through Regan, Mugrabi later moved to undo that default. Argument on that motion was scheduled for August 19. Regan’s request to quit has now put the case on hold while the court decides whether to let him go.

Regan’s second exit is from the case Urgent Matter previously reported: art critic and cartoonist Anthony Haden-Guest’s claim that Mugrabi kept 97 of his drawings and cartoons at her Southampton home for about 15 years after a planned selling exhibition never happened.

Haden-Guest is asking for the works back or $97,000, plus $18,000 for fashion work, and he brought the case as claims for replevin and conversion — the legal terms for demanding property back and for someone wrongly keeping property that isn’t theirs.

Mugrabi, through Regan & Associates, denied every allegation in a verified answer filed on July 21, documents show. She told the New York Post in May that the cartoons claims were “bogus.”

The largest tangle of litigation grew out of a loan Mugrabi tried and failed to get. Through her financial advisor, she approached Art Capital Group and Empire Chesapeake Holdings in 2023 seeking about $3 million, secured by a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, Untitled, 1982, documents show.

When Mugrabi could not pay Art Capital’s $12,500 due-diligence fee in cash, the parties signed a supplemental agreement in November 2023. Under it, she pledged a second painting, Andy Warhol’s Jackie, 1964, to cover the fees and released the Warhol to the lenders. She then failed to qualify for the loan, which the lenders blamed on her credit history and outstanding judgments against her.

What followed is the subject of dueling suits. Art Capital Group, Empire Chesapeake, and their principals Ian Peck and Terence Doran sued Mugrabi and her company, Moo Moo Enterprises, in September 2024 for breach of contract and defamation.

Their complaint alleges that after the loan fell through, Mugrabi tried to bully the lenders into returning the Warhol without paying their fees. It says she filed a false report with Southampton police calling Peck a “thief” who had “stolen” the Warhol.

She also allegedly stood up at a Manhattan restaurant during what was meant to be a closing lunch and screamed that the lenders were “thieves” who had “stolen” the painting. Her then-boyfriend menaced Doran by noting he had done a stint at Rikers Island.

The complaint also says Mugrabi created and spread an Old West-style “WANTED” poster around Manhattan and the Hamptons that accused the lenders of an “ART HEIST” involving a “STOLEN ANDY WARHOL JACKIE 1964” and listed their photos, names and home addresses.

“$10,000 reward given for returned painting,” the poster read, according to the complaint. “Last seen taken from Sag Harbor by art lender, ‘Art Capital.’ If you have any information please contact: fraudstolenart@gmail.com.”

The lenders say Mugrabi then fed the poster to the New York Post, which ran a story that spread the accusations further. They are seeking a judgment of not less than $30 million, plus punitive and triple damages, and want the Basquiat placed in escrow.

Mugrabi’s former financial advisor, Joon Ho Chun, filed his own defamation suit against her in February 2025, saying she named him on the same “WANTED” poster and cost him business.

Chun is seeking at least $1 million. In his complaint, he states that he “personally witnessed Mugrabi using illegal drugs” and that she was subject to a $1.8 million judgment in favor of a former landlord trying to collect.

Mugrabi sued the lenders back. In one action, she claimed they defamed her through a sworn statement by Peck, who said during due diligence the lenders “became aware of allegations that Mugrabi was a drug addict who wasted her fortune obtained in her divorce with her ex-husband on drugs and other ill-advised expenses.”

Justice Lyle E. Frank threw that defamation claim out in August 2025 under New York’s anti-SLAPP law, which lets defendants quickly kill lawsuits aimed at speech on matters of public interest and can require the person who sued to pay the other side’s legal fees.

Frank found that Peck’s statement was made in the course of litigation, that it referred to “allegations” rather than declaring Mugrabi an addict, and that she had not shown the statement was made with knowledge it was false. He made no finding that the drug allegations were true, and ordered a hearing on legal fees.

In a second suit, Mugrabi challenged the liens the lenders had filed against her paintings. That case turned on the Uniform Commercial Code, the body of law governing loans backed by property, and on a UCC-1 financing statement, the public filing a lender uses to stake a claim to collateral.

Frank sided largely with Mugrabi there. On July 31, he granted her partial summary judgment. He invalidated the lien on the Basquiat and ordered the lenders not to interfere with the painting. The Warhol had already been sold in June 2024 for $325,000, documents show. Frank denied Mugrabi’s demands over the Warhol and left the question of money damages for later.

The lenders appealed that ruling to the Appellate Division, First Department, on August 10. In their papers opposing Mugrabi below, they cast her as a serial, losing litigant.

“Here we go again,” their brief began. “After two failed Orders to Show Cause in this Court and one failed Application for Interim and Expedited Relief in the First Department, Elizabeth a.k.a ‘Libbie’ Mugrabi and her entity Moo Moo Enterprises, LLC now move for a summary judgment on essentially the same grounds they have thrice failed to prevail on in Court.”

“Mugrabi squandered her sizeable divorce settlement through frivolous spending and is now embroiled in multiple litigations with creditors,” the brief said. It said she told the New York Post the loan was “to buy a house in the South of France” even as she could not pay rent on her Manhattan apartment and her Hamptons house faced foreclosure.

The creditor cases are their own cluster. On July 8, JPMorgan Chase Bank sued Mugrabi in Suffolk County to collect $38,885.25 on a credit-card account, saying her last payment came in June 2025.

In her November 2024 resignation letter, Farid listed still more matters she had been handling for Mugrabi: a Kings County suit by Janneth Gonzalez-Duarte, and two suits by a landlord, 320 E 82nd Owner LLC, in Manhattan and Suffolk County.

Farid’s letter laid out the same pattern Regan would describe two years later. She wrote that her requests for documents and information had been “ignored,” that she had not received what she needed to represent Mugrabi, and that “your lack of communication has significantly hindered my ability to provide you with competent and effective legal services.”

In the Beam case specifically, Farid wrote that Mugrabi had either not responded to her emails or had told her she did not want to discuss the matter.

Follow along with other lawsuits at Urgent Matter’s art lawsuit tracker.