Christina Ambers Suing Apartment For Discrimination

photo courtesy Carmen Hand Models.

Ambers says her NYC building let her hang on a limb.

Chistina Ambers is considered to be the Heidi Klum of foot and hand models, with her digits appearing in advertisements for such high-profile companies as Harry Winston, Anne Klein, Maybelline and Oil of Olay. But her high status in the fashion and beauty industries did not trump her status among her apartment neighbors after she married the building's porter and doorman, Angel Rotger.

Christina Ambers moved in to her 700-foot 74th Street apartment on New York's Upper East Side in 2003. Ambers is now claiming that after she married building employee Angel Rotger in 2007, he was fired from his job, and she was left to accept her own packages at her building and hail her own taxis. (The utter shame of it! You mean there are people in New York who do that for you? Goes to show what my status was in the four years I lived on the Upper East Side!) But there have been violent acts against the couple, with one female tenant in the building allegedy bagging Rotger in the groin so forcefully that he fled to the hospital with a contusion.

Apparently Ambers feels that this mistreatment is due to her co-op board's opinion that she married down by becoming the wife of a Hispanic man - she says, "I hope that people can understand how awful it is to come home and to then be treated with hostility in a building where I have paid a lot of money to live. Nobody should have to live this way."

Christina Ambers wants $10 million from the building for discrimination because she feels the residents and co-op board object to a "Hispanic former porter" living in the building as her husband.

Such a strange case. It will go to court in Manhattan, but the building lawyer says Christina Amber's claims are "without merit."