Eric Lamaze has lost the second of two seven-figure lawsuits related to his horse sales practices after a judge ruled Dec. 30 in favor of Nikka VD Bisschop’s former co-owner, Lorna “Muffie” Guthrie.

The recent ruling from Florida Circuit Court Judge Maxine Cheesman struck Lamaze’s pleadings and entered a final judgement of just over $1.6 million, plus attorney costs and fees, in favor of Guthrie, a family friend and former investor in Lamaze’s horses.

The two-year legal battle began in January 2023 when Guthrie and her now-deceased husband Jeffrey Brandmaier sued the Canadian Olympian for fraud, breach of contract, and breaking Florida law, claiming he owed them more than $1.4 million related to the misrepresented purchase of “Nikka” and another horse, and the subsequent sale of Nikka—who would go on to represent Canada in the Olympics and world championships—to his former clients Mark and Tara Rein. 

“It is sad that the legacy of Eric Lamaze will be his deceitful and disloyal dealing with the many friends and families who for decades supported him and his career,” Guthrie said of the verdict and the events leading up to it.

(The Reins, who later filed a cross-claim related to Guthrie’s suit, won that suit Sept. 5 when the Florida court ruled in their favor to the tune of $5.5 million—a decision Lamaze has appealed.)

While Cheesman originally ruled in favor of Guthrie and Brandmaier in November 2023, that decision was overturned by an appeals court and the case returned to Cheesman’s court in May 2025. The appellate court found that the lower court “abused its discretion” and denied Lamaze due process when, during a September 2023 hearing, Cheesman heard testimony and ruled against him after granting his then-attorney’s request to withdraw from representing him.  

The December 2025 ruling came after Lamaze apparently missed multiple hearings and case management conferences scheduled in the case since it was returned to circuit court, including a final hearing set for Nov. 13 in which the judge was to consider Guthrie’s attorneys’ motion to have Lamaze’s pleadings struck and a final judgement entered in her favor. 

“The Lamaze Defendants have failed to attend multiple duly noticed hearings in this case, including the [Nov. 13] hearing on the plaintiff’s motion to strike,” Cheesman wrote in her final judgement. “Despite clear instructions from the court requiring all parties’ attendance, and despite direct communications between the court and [Lamaze’s most recent representative in the case, publicist Pascal Renauldon] on the same day of the hearing, where it became evident that Mr. Lamaze made a conscious and deliberate decision to disregard the court and go horseback riding instead, Mr. Renauldon advised the court that Mr. Lamaze would not appear at the hearing.”

The judge also noted that, while Lamaze can represent himself in such hearings, law requires that the “corporate defendants”—his companies Torrey Pines Stables Florida, Torrey Pines Stables, Inc., and Little Creek Investments, Inc.—must have legal representation, and that they had violated multiple court orders by failing to find counsel since Lamaze first was told to do so in December 2024, when his most recent attorney withdrew from representing the rider and his businesses. 

“The court finds that the corporate Lamaze defendants have acted in deliberate and contumacious disregard of this court’s authority by failing to comply with both the January 2025 order and the August 2025 order, which cumulatively provided …  over ten (10) months to obtain counsel,” Cheesman wrote in striking all the corporate pleadings in the case.

“Rather than retaining licensed counsel as required, the court finds that the Lamaze defendants improperly relied on a nonlawyer, Mr. Renauldon, to act on their behalf in this litigation,” the document continues, noting that Renauldon’s participation in the case, which included filing various motions for Lamaze, “exceed clerical assistance and constitute the unauthorized practice of law.”

For his part, Renauldon, founder of the French public relations firm R&B Presse, had argued both to the court and to the public, via press releases, that Lamaze was caught in a “procedural trap,” saying that because the court froze his assets in 2023, he has been “stripped of the resources needed to fund a fair defense.” 

Renauldon said this week he has never acted as an attorney, only as an administrative assistant to help Lamaze. Lamaze filed an appeal to the December decision on Jan. 12, he added, noting that the December ruling was so similar to the 2023 one overturned by the appeals court that it, too, should be overturned.

Previously, in response to the September ruling in favor of the Rein family, he had written that plaintiffs’ attorneys “exploited the fact that while an individual may appear pro se, a corporate entity must be represented by an attorney—an impossibility as long as Lamaze’s assets remained frozen.”

Lamaze also argued in court, as recently as Dec. 24, that he should not be required to participate in the circuit court case until his appeal to the Reins counterclaim—filed Sept. 30 in Florida’s 4^th District Court of Appeal—has been ruled upon. 

“Compelling discovery, depositions, or execution-related proceedings at this stage risks irreparable prejudice by effectively mooting the appeal before the appellate court has ruled,” he wrote Dec. 24, objecting to an effort by Guthrie’s lawyers to force him to participate in the proceedings.

The circuit court judge, however, based her decision in part on what she called Lamaze’s “deliberate, material and pervasive fraud upon this court,” writing that his arguments in the case—including those to have his assets unfrozen—revolved around his claim of being ill and in treatment for brain cancer, documents related to which were found by a Canadian judge to be fraudulent.

“The court finds that Eric Lamaze testified under oath on February 24, 2023, that he had been receiving brain cancer treatment for five (5) years in Belgium and that he required continued treatment, including an imminent surgery date,” the judgement states. “The court later learned through competent, credible evidence that these assertions were false, that the letter he submitted was forged, and that the referenced medical provider confirmed that Eric Lamaze was not its patient. Plaintiffs had listed Mr. Lamaze as a witness in their exhibit register for the hearing and were providing him with another opportunity to explain himself, but he chose not to appear.” 

Because of that choice, law dictated that his previous testimony be entered as evidence, she wrote.

“The court concludes that the Lamaze defendants’ conduct constitutes a fraud that permeates the entirety of these proceedings,” the decision states. “Their pleadings cannot be trusted, their testimony has been shown to be false, and their submissions were deliberately fabricated. As such, striking the Lamaze defendants’ pleadings is both warranted and necessary to protect the integrity of the judicial process.”

The medical documents referenced first were presented in a different, Canadian case that lasted for 14 years, from 2010-2024, in which the Aziz family, former clients of the rider’s, sued him for misrepresenting horses he sold them. Lamaze’s Canadian attorney in that case presented the documents in an effort to delay court proceedings due to the rider’s purported ongoing cancer treatment. A U.S. attorney representing him in the Guthrie case supplied the same documents to the Florida court, also as documentation to support Lamaze not appearing in court. Both attorneys have since stopped representing Lamaze and said they were not initially aware the documents were forgeries. 

In the September 2023 hearing, in which Lamaze’s then-attorney recused himself after the forgeries were discovered, Lamaze testified without attorney representation that the letters were written by a secretary “without me knowing about it” and told the judge that his brain cancer had been in remission since 2021, but he was instead being treated for throat cancer. That hearing, and the fact that the attorney was recused before Lamaze testified, formed the basis for an appeals court to overturn Cheesman’s first judgement in the case, entered in November 2023, in favor of Guthrie and Brandmaier.

In entering her final judgement, Cheesman enumerated multiple reasons for striking Lamaze’s pleas and ruling in favor of Guthrie. It also touched on his repeated requests to have his assets unfrozen through the dissolution of writs of garnishment enforced early in the case. 

“The Lamaze defendants’ fraudulent conduct went to the heart of their arguments seeking dissolution of the writs of garnishment and other relief,” she wrote. “The court relied on Mr. Lamaze’s sworn testimony and the fabricated submissions when evaluating those issues. Because the fraud permeated the core of their defense strategy, striking their pleadings is appropriate for this reason as well.” 

Show jumper Karina Frederiks, whose family filed the Canadian lawsuit and hired the investigator who uncovered the forged medical documents that were Lamaze’s undoing in both his U.S. and Canadian cases, noted this week that both Guthrie’s husband, Brandmaier, and the Aziz family’s attorney, Jerome Morse, who worked on their case for many years, have died from cancer since court proceedings began. Guthrie had purchased Nikka around the time Brandmaier was diagnosed with cancer, “so he could enjoy his last four summers,” Fredericks wrote.

“It infuriates me that Eric faked having one of the most deadly cancers, and the good people around him were actually taken out by a much less deadly type of cancer then what he claimed to have,” she added.