According to the lawsuit, DeAngelis suffered a serious injury to her left hand during the alleged attack and ultimately required surgery. Nearly three years later, she says the consequences have not disappeared.
The complaint states that her injuries are “permanent and continuing.”
DeAngelis alleges that she continues to experience reduced mobility and has difficulty performing certain tasks she could handle before the incident. She also claims the attack left substantial scars on her hand.
Her lawsuit, filed August 20 in Manhattan Supreme Court, seeks unspecified damages. The claims include medical expenses, emotional distress and other losses that DeAngelis says stem from the attack and its aftermath.
The circumstances surrounding the dog’s presence inside the store are expected to be central to the case.
Whole Foods generally prohibits pets inside its stores but makes exceptions for service animals as required by federal law. DeAngelis alleges that the dog involved in the attack was not a legitimate service animal and contends that employees should not have allowed it to remain inside the supermarket.
The complaint accuses Whole Foods of failing to reasonably enforce its policies regarding animals on the premises. It further alleges that the company failed to exercise reasonable care in regulating and controlling animals permitted inside the property.
The dog and its owner reportedly departed the store before police arrived, according to accounts previously provided to the New York Post.
DeAngelis is best known to television viewers as a Fox Business personality and co-host of “The Big Money Show.” The alleged attack has now placed her at the center of a very different kind of legal battle—one involving store safety, service-animal rules and the responsibilities businesses have when animals enter their premises.
Federal law provides important protections for legitimate service animals. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, a service dog is individually trained to perform work or tasks connected to a person’s disability. An animal whose role is limited to providing emotional support does not meet the ADA’s federal definition of a service animal.
Businesses that generally prohibit pets must nevertheless accommodate qualifying service animals in most circumstances.
There are limits, however. A service animal can be excluded when it is not under control and its handler fails to take effective steps to control it.
That distinction could become significant as DeAngelis’ case moves forward. Her allegations specifically challenge whether the dog that allegedly attacked her qualified for the legal protections afforded to service animals and whether Whole Foods properly enforced its own rules.
Whole Foods had not publicly responded to the allegations when the lawsuit was initially reported.
Beyond the specific claims in the lawsuit, the case also lands in the middle of a much larger and often heated national argument over serious dog attacks.
Questions surrounding pit bull-type dogs have generated intense debate for years. Advocates on different sides have disputed whether breed is a meaningful predictor of dangerous behavior, while researchers have examined whether certain types of dogs are disproportionately represented in the most severe injuries.
Some trauma-center research has reported that injuries attributed to pit bull-type dogs are associated with more serious outcomes and a greater likelihood of requiring surgery.
A 2026 trauma-center study examining 276 dog-bite patients reported that attacks identified as involving pit bulls were significantly more likely to result in surgical intervention. At the same time, the researchers cautioned that breed identification based on observations by owners or patients can introduce bias and affect the reliability of such classifications.
Other research has similarly identified pit bull-type dogs and German shepherds among breeds associated with some of the more severe dog-bite injuries examined in U.S. studies.
But breed statistics remain heavily contested. Dogs can be difficult to identify accurately by appearance alone, mixed-breed animals make categorization more complicated, and researchers lack a universally accepted figure for the number of pit bull-type dogs living in the United States.
DogsBite.org, an advocacy organization focused on serious dog attacks, has reported that pit bulls accounted for approximately 66 percent of fatalities in its records from 2005 through 2019. That figure reflects the organization’s own methodology for identifying breeds rather than an official federal database of breed-specific fatality statistics, as previously reported by Trending Politics.
Those broader arguments, however, are distinct from the legal questions now facing Whole Foods.
At the heart of DeAngelis’ lawsuit is a much narrower issue: what happened inside the Columbus Circle store, why the dog was permitted to be there, whether it qualified as a service animal, and whether Whole Foods had a legal obligation to take steps that could have prevented the alleged attack.
For DeAngelis, the consequences are not merely legal or financial. She says an ordinary trip to the grocery store resulted in surgery, permanent scarring and continuing limitations affecting her everyday life.
The lawsuit will now put those allegations before the courts, where the facts surrounding the September 2023 incident—and Whole Foods’ responsibility for what allegedly happened—will ultimately be tested.
