A dog-bites-woman story usually isn’t much of a story at all. But an incident in one of L.A.’s wealthiest enclaves has become something else entirely.

What began in a Brentwood park on a summer day in 2022, when a dog owned by billionaire surgical-device inventor Gary Michelson allegedly bit another pet owner, has turned into dueling lawsuits and an allegation of blackmail.

Michelson claims it’s a simple case of extortion. He says interior designer Sandra Evling tried to force him to pay her $85,000 by threatening to publicly humiliate him and report his dog to authorities, which she claimed would lead to the pet being put down. He filed suit first, seeking damages in excess of $250,000.

From Evling’s perspective, he should have known better. She alleged Michelson, a philanthropist prominent in animal welfare circles, let his dog run free despite knowing it had bitten other animals and one other person — traumatizing her and causing severe injuries, according to a personal injury lawsuit she filed in response seeking unspecified damages.

In a town where the rich have legitimate fears of extortion, is this a case of a person seeking a payday? Or a billionaire using his wealth and legal savvy to protect himself from responsibility for an aggressive animal?

Michelson, 75, seems an unlikely antagonist in a dog-bite case. After reaching a $1.35-billion patent dispute settlement with medical device maker Medtronic two decades ago, he has made a name for himself as a philanthropist in animal welfare and other fields.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005 orphaned more than 100,000 pets, he established the nation’s first free microchip pet registry. He has a standing prize offer of $25 million for the development of a single-dose medication that can permanently and safely sterilize both cats and dogs.

Michelson’s devotion to animal welfare extended to his own pet Blue, a beige-and-white dog with droopy eyes he celebrated on Instagram with the tongue-in-cheek handle @scarypitbully. The page, since taken down, documented the maturation of the American bully XL, the largest of a muscular breed derived from the American pit bull terrier that the United Kennel Club describes as more gentle and playful, making it an excellent family dog.

Michelson and Evling, 37, an immigrant from Sweden, were regulars at Veterans’ Barrington Park. They lived nearby: Evling in an apartment and Michelson in a $24-million mansion.

The incident took place Aug. 9, 2022, just outside a fenced-in dog park on ball fields where owners let their dogs run free.

Dogs tend to play off-leash on a sports field adjacent to the dog park at Veterans’ Barrington Park.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

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Evling, in her lawsuit, said that she was walking with her dog Neo, a tamaskan, when Blue charged her pet, and that she was bitten trying to protect it. She sought treatment that evening at an urgent care clinic complaining of pain in her left hand from a crush injury and an abrasion to her right elbow, according to medical records reviewed by The Times.

An X-ray found no fractures or vascular injuries in her hand, which was put in a finger splint. She was given a tetanus shot and prescribed antibiotics, the records show.

In messages sent to The Times, Michelson said the records are not evidence of dog bites, claiming instead she might have twisted her finger on her dog’s collar and scraped her elbow while falling. He said that afterward he checked on Evling “for days” and offered to pay her medical bills. He said that the calls were cordial and that she “seemed ok.”

Michelson said he also set up a session at his house with celebrity dog trainer Cesar Millan, a longtime friend, to work with Neo and Blue together so that “Sandra could feel comfortable at the dog park with Blue around.”

Gary Michelson’s dog Blue.

(Courtesy of Gary Michelson)

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After the session, Michelson said, he and Evling would see each other at Gold’s Gym Venice, where they both brought their service-dog pets. He said that “things were always quite friendly” and that Evling never complained of being bitten until she learned of his wealth.

Attorney Benjamin Taylor, who represents Evling in the extortion lawsuit, said Evling knew Michelson’s background “well before this incident.”

On April 20, 2023, eight months after the alleged attack, Evling texted Michelson asking to meet the next day at the gym, according to a copy of the pair’s text string provided by former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, a friend of Michelson’s who is listed as one of his attorneys in the extortion lawsuit.

Their conversation continued via texts. Evling complained she was suffering from “severe PTSD” and a lifelong scar from the attack, and chastised Michelson about another alleged incident at the park involving Blue.

“When I was told that you had taken Blue off leash at the park this week and that he had attacked another dog all my trauma came back (like it happened all over again) and a severe anger that you’re not taking this problem seriously. Is it going to take someone getting killed before you realize how serious this is?” she texted. (Michelson denied Blue ever attacked another dog or person in answers to a list of questions sent to Cooley in February.)

Evling, who had stated she didn’t want to involve attorneys, laid out two options.

If Michelson chose Option A, she would have him and his dog expelled from the gym, file a report with police and animal control that would result in the dog being put down, and file a class-action lawsuit with other parkgoers that “will cost you a loooot of money.”

If Michelson chose Option B, Evling texted, he could keep Blue as long as he paid her $85,000, kept his dog on a leash and didn’t bring it to the park. She promised not to file a complaint with the gym so long as Michelson kept Blue away from her while she was training. She added she would sign a nondisclosure agreement that would be voided only if Blue attacked her or her dog again, not if Blue was aggressive with others.

“It is time for you take responsibility and suffer the consequences of your actions,” she texted.

Several days later, Michelson asked Evling how she arrived at the compensation figure and how he and his wife, recording artist Alya Michelson, could trust that she wouldn’t carry out her threats anyway.

Evling said she had consulted with several law firms and claimed the $85,000 would be less than a court judgment. She assured him she wouldn’t talk to anyone or file legal action. “I AM a person of my word and just want to move on as much as you do and leave this in the past,” she texted on April 27.

The negotiations then turned sour. Michelson told Evling he had just learned from several dog park friends that she was recruiting plaintiffs for a lawsuit, accusing her of “already breaking your promise.” However, he said he was immediately sending a “good faith” payment of $10,000 if she would not take the steps she had outlined. “Hopefully, this small measure of restraint will be acceptable to you,” he texted.

Evling disputed that she was preparing a lawsuit, contending she had only learned of the new alleged attack through a dog park chat group.

After being assured the $10,000 was a partial payment, Evling said she would not take further action as long as she received a contract by May 15 for the remainder of the $85,000. Michelson filed his extortion lawsuit days later on May 3.

Taylor said Evling had sought payment to resolve the matter informally without attorneys in the hopes of avoiding a “spectacle.” “Now that Dr. Michelson decided to sue her first, she looks forward to her day in court,” he said.

Attorney Ryan Baker, a founding partner of L.A. law firm Waymaker, reviewed the exchange to offer an opinion on whether it amounted to civil extortion, which under California law includes receiving a benefit such as money through the threatened exposure of any “disgrace or crime” even if falsely alleged.

Baker said that Evling had the right to pursue a private settlement under the threat of her own lawsuit, but if she threatened to report Michelson unless he met her demands she crossed a “bright line.” “She can’t become her own private judge, jury and executioner,” he said.

Michelson was “extremely shrewd,” he said, to seek the demands in writing and send the $10,000, since receiving it would be a key element of civil extortion.

Baker said a “critical question” a jury would have to decide was whether Evling had extorted the money or had simply received and kept it.

After Evling was sued, she filed a personal injury lawsuit that claimed Blue had bitten four dogs and one person in 2022 before the attack on her, and one poodle afterward.

Her lawsuit provided few details about the other alleged attacks. Blue, though, was a topic of a dog park group chat on April 17, 2023 — the day of the alleged poodle attack. Multiple members of the chat alleged that Michelson brought his dog to the park and that his dog had repeated altercations with other animals.

Michelson denied Blue has a history of aggression, contending “chat rooms are not acceptable or reliable sources of factual information,” in response to the questions sent Cooley. He said that Evling’s characterization of his pet, which is referred to as a “vicious animal” in her lawsuit, “reeks of outdated stereotypes.”

Michelson pointed to a lack of complaints with Los Angeles Animal Services as evidence, which the department confirmed in February in response to a California Public Records Act request.

Judie Mancuso, the founder of Social Compassion in Legislation, a public policy group that advocates for animals in Sacramento, said Blue was “super well behaved” at a fundraiser Michelson and his wife hosted for the nonprofit in July at the couple’s Brentwood home.

“The dog didn’t even bark at anyone,” Mancuso said.

At the time of the dog park incident, neither of their dogs were neutered. Michelson said in a text this was to allow Blue to compete as a purebred show dog. He said he opted to have Blue neutered last month because of the difficulty of participating in competition with a dog whose breed is not recognized by the American Kennel Club. “As I am a champion for S&N [spay and neuter], I gave up and had him neutered,” he texted.

Evling’s dog was 8 months old at the time. He has since been neutered, according to Taylor.

In support of her allegations that Blue was aggressive, Evling collected the names and numbers of some two dozen people she alleged had witnessed attacks, including 12 chat group members, whose identities were disclosed in court filings. The Times attempted to contact all of them; most did not respond or would not comment publicly.

Syed Ahmed, a Brentwood data analyst, was an exception. He said that his dog Turbo, a male 70-pound Doberman pinscher, and Blue got into a fight in March 2022 and that Michelson’s dog “ended up grabbing my dog by the throat.” Evling’s lawsuit alleged a dog of that name was bitten that month.

Turbo was treated for puncture wounds, according to a veterinary bill provided to The Times, along with photos of the bite wound.

Ahmed said he didn’t ask Michelson to reimburse him for his $908.10 bill. Michelson “was very apologetic, and that’s why I didn’t pursue anything. I was like, OK, you know, s— happens,” he said.

After Michelson learned from The Times last month that the dog had been injured, he reimbursed Ahmed for his veterinary bill.

Michelson said that he believed Turbo just wanted to play, but that Blue bit the dog because he had been attacked several times by other male dogs. “Blue misread the dog’s intent and reacted to protect himself. I was very upset that it happened,” he emailed. “I will testify under oath that I have never seen Blue attack anyone, ever.”

Michelson’s and Evling’s lawsuits are wending their way through Superior Court. Trial dates for each have been set for next year.

In early December, Evling saw Westside plastic and reconstructive surgeon Michael Zarrabi to examine the scar allegedly left by the dog bite on her right elbow. Zarrabi called the injury “disfiguring” and recommended surgery, multiple laser treatments and topical ointments that he anticipated would improve the appearance 80%, according to medical records reviewed by The Times. The estimated cost: $41,900.

Michelson, in a text, called the estimate “beyond absurd.” He said in an email that he consulted a “well-regarded” Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who, after seeing pictures of the abrasion, said the scar tissue could be removed for $5,000 — half the $10,000 he had already sent her.

As the two parties await trial, Evling has started a business selling Swedish cookies, while Michelson has remained active in civic and philanthropic circles. He rubbed elbows with Gov. Gavin Newsom at an event announcing UCLA’s acquisition of the former Westside Pavilion mall, which the university is converting into a research park. It will house the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, which Michelson chairs and has pledged $120 million toward.

One place he apparently has not been in a long while is the Barrington dog park.

After the alleged poodle attack, Michelson texted Evling that he was never going to the dog park again and “it is my intention to stay as far away from you as possible.”

Taylor said she had stopped going there too.

The longest-running melodrama in sports is less about events on the field of play than on machinations in the ownership suite of baseball’s Oakland A’s, who are close to finalizing a move to Las Vegas three or four years from now.

At least, that’s the hope of Major League Baseball and the team’s billionaire owner, John Fisher. That the deal will ultimately close as expected is the way to bet, to speak the language of Las Vegas.

But increasingly there are grounds to take the under. As my colleague Bill Shaikin reports, two challenges to the public funding for the team’s proposed new Vegas ballpark have emerged from a Nevada teachers union.

Strong Public Schools Nevada, a political action committee of the Nevada State Education Assn., has filed a lawsuit questioning the public funding as unconstitutional. A separate committee of the union is pressing to qualify for November’s state ballot a voter referendum on the funding.

At issue is a measure signed last year by Nevada’s Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, authorizing $380 million in public funding for a ballpark estimated to cost $1.5 billion. The rest supposedly would come from Fisher and any other private investors he persuades to come on board.

The absurdity of making a grant of public money to a billionaire and his rich cronies for a sports venue while other public needs are more pressing isn’t lost on the teachers, and it shouldn’t be lost on anyone else.

“Nevada ranks 48th in per pupil funding with the largest class sizes and highest educator vacancies in the nation,” the teachers union stated when it filed its lawsuit in February. Yet “during the last Legislative Session, with important education issues outstanding … Nevada politicians singularly focused on financing a ‘world-class’ stadium for a California billionaire.”

They’re right. Fisher, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be $3 billion, is the quintessential member of the Lucky Sperm Club, not to be indelicate. He’s an heir of Donald and Doris Fisher, founders of Gap Inc. Forbes ranks his “self-made score” at 2 on a scale of 10, meaning that almost all his wealth was inherited.

As I wrote last year, since becoming the sole owner of the A’s in 2016, Fisher has systematically dismantled the team and allowed its home stadium, the Oakland Coliseum, to crumble away.

The nearly 60-year-old multipurpose park was always a terrible place to watch a baseball game, with seats ridiculously distant from the action, but in recent years the experience has only gotten worse. During one game, the stadium flooded with sewage. On another occasion, the lights went out. Feral animals roamed the increasingly vacant corridors. Then, for the 2022 season, Fisher doubled season ticket prices.

Meanwhile, he and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred shed crocodile tears over the lack of fan support in Oakland. But what kind of product have Fisher and MLB been asking fans to pay for? In a nutshell: The A’s stink. Last year they turned in the worst record in baseball by losing 112 of their 162 games. They scored 339 fewer runs than they gave up to opponents.

This record was the product not of chance, but design. The team payroll last season of $43 million ranked dead last in the league, 12% of the league-leading New York Mets (who, to be fair, hardly made the most of their $334-million payroll, losing nearly 54% of their games). The best-paid player on the A’s, shortstop Aledmys Diaz, batted .229 last year and has started this season on the injured list.

Fisher embarked on an ostensibly serious search for an alternative venue in the Bay Area. Oakland municipal officials trying to work with him on a plan to keep the team accused him of sabotaging those efforts, in part by insisting on massive subsidies for expansive joint stadium/commercial/residential developments.

The A’s have announced that after completing their sojourn in Oakland at the end of the season, they’ll play in the ballpark of the minor league Sacramento River Cats for the next three years, maybe four, while their new stadium rises on the Vegas Strip site of the Tropicana Hotel, which is due to be demolished this year.

The Sacramento ballpark has about 14,000 seats, but it may still seem almost vacant when the A’s play there, as the average attendance at the team’s 13 home games in Oakland so far this year is 6,243, worst in the league by an unhealthy margin. The last year that average home attendance at A’s games exceeded 14,000 was 2019. At a game last May between the A’s and the Arizona Diamondbacks, only 2,064 seats were occupied, the lowest attendance for an A’s game in 44 years.

So what would Las Vegas gain from importing the A’s? Probably almost nothing. In very rare cases, a new sports venue can augment economic activity in a town or city, usually one with little else in sports or entertainment on offer.

Las Vegas is not exactly the kind of community in desperate need of another tourist draw. An A’s ballpark — or for that matter, the NFL Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium, where this year’s Super Bowl was held — can’t do much for a city where hotel occupancy is generally close to the highest in the nation.

As Bloomberg reported earlier this year apropos of Allegiant, “had the $1.9 billion stadium not been built at all, Las Vegas businesses wouldn’t have noticed the difference.” And any time that tourists spend at a ballgame is time they’re not spending inside the city’s true cash cows, its casinos.

Even when a new venue brings in new dollars, the gains for the home community typically comes at the expense of its larger region. Think of it as the Inglewood effect: This outpost of 110,000 residents may be seeing more business from SoFi Stadium, where the NFL Rams and Chargers play, but the chances that it has had a measurable impact on Los Angeles County (population 9.7 million) are minuscule to the point of being nonexistent.

Some Inglewood business owners and residents, as it happens, are complaining that the project has brought them increased traffic and noise; higher residential and commercial rents have forced some residents and businesses out of the city.

That brings us back to the challenges to the Vegas stadium financing brought by the Nevada teachers. The clock is ticking on both the union’s lawsuit and its proposed ballot measures. Since February, almost nothing has happened in the Carson City courthouse where the lawsuit was filed.

That makes the A’s nervous, for the legislative authorization for public financing expires 18 months after MLB’s approval of the team’s relocation, which was delivered on Nov. 16 with a unanimous vote of the MLB team owners — giving the team a deadline of mid-May 2025 to complete all its necessary agreements with local authorities. That places the deadline a bit more than a year from now, assuming the court allows the legislation to stand.

If the legislation is overturned, the team and its government promoters would be back at square one. That’s why the team petitioned the court a few days ago to allow it to intervene in the lawsuit, which would allow them to speak up for their own interests in court. “The Athletics … will be affected if SB 1 is found unconstitutional,” A’s President Dave Kaval declared in a court filing. “Each year of delay will cost the Athletics millions of dollars.”

The union’s effort to overturn the public financing at the ballot box is also moving slowly through the Nevada courts. Its petition to place a referendum on the November ballot was invalidated in November by a state judge. The union appealed to the Nevada Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on the case April 9 but hasn’t issued a decision.

The union has until June 26, or just over two months from now, to collect more than 102,000 valid signatures of registered voters to place the referendum on the November ballot. But it can’t start the process until the court resolves the validity of its petition.

That’s important, because there are indications that Nevada voters are less than eager to spend public money on the A’s stadium. A poll released April 4 by the nonpartisan polling center of Boston-based Emerson College found that 52% of voters are opposed to the public funding, against only 32% in favor and 17% unsure.

The public financing of stadiums for team owners who could pay for construction out of their own pockets peaked in the 1990s, when voters finally got fed up with giveaways that left their cities and states holding the bag for venues that consistently ran in the red.

The trend faded, but never entirely disappeared. Recently, it has experienced a revival. Last year, the New York legislature and Erie County approved subsidies totaling at least $850 million for a new stadium for the NFL‘s Buffalo Bills. The team’s owner, oil and gas tycoon Terry Pegula, is even richer than Fisher, with a net worth of $6.8 billion, according to Forbes; he’s also almost entirely a self-made man.

Pegula brought the politicians to heel by threatening to move the team to Austin. The result was the largest taxpayer handout in U.S. sports history, narrowly edging out the $750-million subsidy Nevada posted to bring the NFL Oakland Raiders to Las Vegas in 2022.

The game of rent-seeking that Fisher has played with Oakland and Las Vegas is every bit as humiliating for taxpayers as the Bills and Raiders deals. It will make the A’s the most-traveled pro sports team in American history, having originated as the Philadelphia Athletics under the legendary Connie Mack in 1901 before moving to Kansas City in 1955 and Oakland in 1968, with Sacramento and Las Vegas now in its future.

So a sports franchise with 15 American League pennants and nine World Series titles to its name and more than 100 years of loyal fandom in three cities will continue its existence as a token of Major League Baseball’s unsavory dalliance with the gambling industry.

The supine political leaders of Nevada should be ashamed at sticking their constituents with a billionaire’s invoice. The lords of the MLB should be ashamed of so shabbily treating the fans who supported the Oakland A’s through four World Series titles and stuck with them until Fisher made the spectacle on the field simply unwatchable.

Here’s an easy prediction: This won’t be the last time that pro sports owners show their willingness to treat their fans like crap, as long as someone is off in the distance waving millions of dollars around.

The fault lines running through California’s spiraling homeowners insurance crisis were on display Tuesday at a state hearing, where consumer advocates clashed with industry firms over a plan to allow insurers to use complex computer models to set premiums — a move state officials say will attract insurers to the market.

State Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara has proposed allowing insurers to employ so-called catastrophe modeling, which uses algorithms that predict the future risk properties face from wildfires, when setting the price of policies. Currently, rates are based on an insurance company’s past losses, which insurers increasingly dismiss as insufficient in light of the widespread acceptance that climate change has thrust California into a more dangerous future by causing more wildfires.

The models, which are in use in other states, are a key element of Lara’s strategy to moderate price increases by allowing more accurate calculation of risks while persuading insurers to do business in neighborhoods prone to wildfires. The move comes amid a recent stream of insurers exiting the California market with announcements they are not renewing policies or have stopped writing new ones.

Consumer groups worried at the hearing that the draft regulations would not allow enough scrutiny of the models, while several consulting firms that have developed them expressed concern about protecting their intellectual property.

“The algorithms and artificial intelligence that private ‘black box’ catastrophe models use will simply be tools for insurance company price gouging unless California mandates real transparency into how they impact prices and imposes real rules of the road regarding their design and use,” said Carmen Balber, executive director of Consumer Watchdog, an L.A. advocacy group that led the campaign for passage of Proposition 103, the 1988 measure that requires homeowners and auto insurers to get state approval for rate hikes.

The group, like other consumer advocates who spoke at the hearing, called on Lara to work with the state’s academic and insurance experts to develop a “public model,” in which all the factors that go into the computer simulations are available for everyone to review. Such a model could be used to set rates or benchmark privately developed models.

The draft regulations require those who want to review the models to sign nondisclosure agreements, which Consumer Watchdog has alleged will prevent its staff members from discussing the models among themselves.

Julia Borman, a director at Verisk, a company that builds computer models used by insurers, expressed concern that the draft proposal put forth by Lara would allow for a review by “countless participants and create the opportunity for an infinite timeline,” while not safeguarding companies from having their models ripped off by others

Michael Soller, the state Department of Insurance’s deputy commissioner for communications, said Lara has publicly stated that the draft rules will allow for the development of public catastrophe models, which the department might then use to evaluate the insurers’ proprietary models.

The proposal to allow catastrophe models is part of Lara’s larger Sustainable Insurance Strategy announced last fall. Other elements include righting the finances of the state’s Fair Access to Insurance Requirements plan, an insurer of last resort that has been deluged with new policyholders since insurers started pulling back from the market. He also wants to allow insurers to include in premiums the cost of reinsurance, which they purchase to protect themselves from disasters.

Catastrophe models are already allowed in California for pricing policies that cover earthquakes and fires caused by quakes. Along with wildfires, under the proposed regulations, the use of the models would also be permitted for insurance covering terrorism, floods and some other types of coverage.

Gerald Zimmerman, senior vice president of government and industry relations at Allstate, which stopped selling new homeowners insurance policies in the state in 2022, said that adopting Lara’s strategy would be a game changer. “Allstate will begin writing new homeowner insurance policies in nearly every corner of California,” he said.

Other speakers at the three-hour hearing included insurance agents and local officials, as well as homeowners groups, which want to ensure that catastrophe models take into account steps taken by homeowners and government agencies to reduce fire risks, such as by making homes more fire-resistant and reducing brush in a community. Although the draft regulations call for doing so, several speakers complained that such mitigation efforts had not been reflected in recent premium increases.

The Insurance Department plans to review Tuesday’s remarks in preparing for the release of a new set of proposed regulations. Lara has the support of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who issued a letter calling for the commissioner to move quickly to resolve the crisis. The regulations do not require legislative approval or the governor’s signature.

“We will review all public comments while staying on track to implement all changes this year, so insurance companies start writing more policies in all areas,” Soller said.