Exclusive | Posh NYC arts club bans Ringling Bros. circus heiress after demanding her service pooches don dog diapers: suit

What a circus.A ritzy Manhattan arts club banned the heiress to the “Ringling Bros” fortune for refusing to put diapers on her service dogs — and now she’s barking mad about it, according to a new lawsuit.The National Arts Club — an exclusive Gramercy Park institution whose celebrity members have reportedly included Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt and Martin Scorsese —  effectively booted heiress-cum-columnist Karen Feld from its historic building, she claims in the suit.Feld, a longtime journalist whose father owned Ringling Bros.and Barnum & Bailey Circus, had been bringing her two small-breed pooches, Mango and Beignet, to events at the club’s posh Victorian mansion to help with her PTSD and seizure disorders, the suit claims.But the National Arts Club’s food and beverage director suddenly booted her from a May 19 event that she’d attended with her pups as a guest of a National Arts Club member, according to the suit, filed this week in Manhattan Supreme Court.Feld said she’d been scheduled to return the following day for a luncheon for the Silurians Press Club — a group of veteran journalists where she serves as a board member.But the press club’s incoming president then passed along a message from the venue declaring that Feld “would not be permitted to attend that day’s scheduled luncheon with her service dogs… unless the service dogs wore dog diapers,” the suit claims.The club cited “sanitation concerns” — but Feld contended the pooches “had been professionally groomed.”Feld, dubbed a “District gossip columnist and socialite” by the Washington Post, said she was left “humiliated in front of colleagues and excluded from an event of an organization on whose board she served.”She called the diaper excuse a cover for alleged illegal disability discrimination, according to the lawsuit.Feld “has attended NAC events for approximately twenty years with her service dogs and, prior to the events described herein...