Key Aspects:
- In January 2025, a Princess Cruises guest was injured after the chair she sat in to watch an onboard show broke.
- She is now suing the cruise line, which she says didn’t act appropriately to protect guests from using the defective chair.
- This lawsuit comes just over a month after a different action was filed by another Princess guest who was injured using the stairs.
While cruise guests love to pick up souvenirs during their sailings, what they don’t want to come home with is injuries.
Unfortunately, one guest was injured while sailing with Princess Cruises earlier this year, and is now pursuing legal action against the Carnival-owned cruise line.
In December, Marie Cassano filed a lawsuit to seek compensation after her January 2025 sailing on a Princess cruise ship went wrong. The specific ship she was onboard has not been publicly named.
Cassano had sat down in the ship’s main theater to watch a show, when her “seat suddenly came apart and collapsed, causing her severe and permanent injuries.”
The specific injuries suffered by the cruiser have also not been publicly released at this time.
A picture of the chair in question, which was first published by TMZ, shows the seat on the floor with a piece of yellow caution tape blocking other guests from attempting to sit there.
Cassano alleges that Princess Cruises either did or should have known that the chair was faulty and did not take proper steps to prevent guests from using the defective seat.
As of the time of this writing, Princess Cruises has not commented publicly on this situation.
Is Princess at Fault?
More recent guests of the cruise line have also noticed similar seating issues during their onboard experiences, which could be a coincidence or might point to a bigger issue.
“I had to look twice at the provided photo, because that same seat on the opposite side has been broken since we boarded the Royal on 11/29,” one recent Royal Princess guest said after learning about the lawsuit.
“There’s not even a “We’re on it!” sign on it (as there are many on board),” they continued.
As all the major cruise lines do, Princess Cruises is careful to maintain its cruise ships to the highest possible standards.
It’s important to remember that these ships are in service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year – and sometimes things simply go wrong.
Most theaters on Princess ships can accommodate somewhere around 900 to 1,000 guests.
It would also be impractical for busy crew members to check each and every chair before every performance – especially if nothing was obviously wrong at a glance.
Assuming the guest reported her injuries to the crew members, she also would have been offered immediate medical attention and an incident report would have been filed to properly document the event.
Lawsuits are Unavoidable
For any company that works with the general public – such as the major cruise lines – lawsuits are simply inevitable.
With this in mind, the cruise lines have their own legal teams on standby, who are experts in maritime and injury law.
This also isn’t the first lawsuit that Princess has been slapped with, and it likely won’t be the last.
Just over a month ago on November 7, 2025, a separate injury lawsuit was filed against Princess in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida by Elizabeth Knigge.
This guest was sailing onboard Enchanted Princess in July of 2024, when she slipped and fell due to a greasy or oily food substance on the stairs while climbing from Deck 16 to Deck 18.
And to illustrate that adverse legal action isn’t only something that Princess faces, Royal Caribbean is currently dealing with a wrongful death suit that was also filed this month.
The suit claims that a passenger of Navigator of the Seas, named Michael Virgil, died in 2024 after allegedly being served too much alcohol.
In November, Carnival was also served with a lawsuit from two passengers over an alleged bedbug infestation.
