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It was a gotcha moment that didn’t go so well for an insurance company determined to play hard ball with a mentally ill young woman.

For 16 days — more than double the usual length of an arbitration — the lawyer for RBC Insurance, now Aviva, hammered away at S.P., insisting she wasn’t really left seriously injured after she was rear-ended in a 2010 collision when she was just 17.

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Witnesses testified S.P. was a shadow of the person she was before the accident. Once a good student who aspired to be a lawyer, her mental health had deteriorated to the point where she was suicidal, repeatedly hospitalized, prone to angry outbursts, forced to drop out of college after a breakdown and incapable of holding down a job.

“She’s not well,” says her lawyer Aliza Karoly. “She’s a young woman who’s psychiatrically damaged.”

How low they will go is just astounding

Of course, the insurer tried everything in their arsenal to prevent having to pay out. How low they will go is just astounding.