A shady New York City spa allegedly intimidated and manipulated an elderly woman into forking over a whopping $675,000 on outrageous “snake oil” treatments and other absurd beauty products.
Phyllis Sousa joins a trio of women who say they were taken for a total of $800,000 by Olle Beauty Clinic’s “predatory” tactics — claiming staff lured them into the spa with flattery before relentlessly pressuring them to hand over their credit cards.
Sousa, 76, says in July 12 court docs filed in Manhattan Supreme Court she was drained of $675,000 between 2022 and 2025.
Whenever she would try to refuse to buy more sessions at the Upper East Side facility on East 65th Street, she was viciously berated and guilt-tripped by employees, she claims in court docs.
Dinah Evan, 87, claims she was charged more than $27,000 in December 2025 for a phony “membership” to the facility after she was “cornered” by employees who demanded she agree to the offer immediately, according to the complaint.
The damning accusations against the beauty center first emerged in February, when Elizabeth Childs-Johnson, 77, accused the business of forcing her to spend $105,000 on treatments.
The semi-retired researcher alleged an employee buttered her up with compliments and lured her into the spa in December 2024, ultimately pressuring her to agree to 12 facials for $40,000.
When those sessions were about to run out at the end of 2025, Childs-Johnson claims a worker trapped her in an office and wouldn’t take no for an answer — forcing her to splurge on pricey treatments that they claimed were from Japan, per the filing.
“It all happened in a matter of minutes,” Childs-Johnson said in February of the terrifying moment she was allegedly cornered by a spa employee and barred from leaving.
“I was stunned. I hardly said a word, all I really did was hand over my credit cards.”
The other women joined the case this month after seeing The Post’s coverage of the situation.
“It’s a pattern of behavior that appears to center on targeting … elderly women above a certain age who are alone,” the trio’s attorney, Andrew Kincaid, told The Post.
“Getting them off the street, getting them into an enclosed private location and pressuring them to do things that they would ordinarily never agree to.”
The filing also accuses the spa of operating under multiple entities in an attempt to make it difficult to track the culprits down.
“The documents started showing a bunch of oddities. Split payments between entities for no apparent reason — and certainly no reason that it was explained to any of my three clients — a bunch of changing addresses, shared addresses, shared email accounts,” Kincaid said.
“Sort of this web that makes it very opaque and hard to deal with, which I believe and we allege is part of the point.”
Olle’s attorney Avram Turkel denied these claims and said the allegations are “fabrications.”
“[The three women] were our client’s repeat and valued customers. At the time of each purchase, they acknowledged the return policy and signed receipts,” Turkel wrote in an email.
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