The Royalton Lease Was Real Real Scandal Is How Reckless Journalism by Ciara Long and Bisnow and Fabricated Lawsuits Drove It Into the Ground
For more than a year, LuxUrban Hotels has been branded a pariah. Headlines blared that the company misled investors about its marquee Royalton Hotel lease. Class-action lawyers raced to recruit plaintiffs. Analysts dismissed its disclosures as puffery, and outlets like Bisnow gleefully amplified a narrative of deception.
But now, buried in court records, comes an inconvenient truth: LuxUrban did, in fact, have an executed lease for the Royalton.
On December 13, 2023, Danielle Frank of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP—counsel to Royalton’s landlord MCR Hotels—emailed LuxUrban’s representative to confirm that “landlord and tenant have executed the Lease.” For those unfamiliar with Fried Frank, it is one of the most credible firms in New York real estate law. Their word carries institutional weight.
This matters because SEC rules are explicit: once a company enters into a material definitive agreement, it must disclose it. In that moment, LuxUrban was not simply permitted to tell the market about the Royalton—it was obligated to do so. Anything less would have been a dereliction of duty.
A False Narrative Takes Hold
Yet facts did not stop the frenzy. Short sellers claimed no lease existed. Reporters repeated it without the most basic due diligence. Opportunistic law firms pounced, filing class actions that leaned heavily on those headlines.
The pile-on effect was brutal. Investor confidence evaporated. Wyndham, its franchise partner, backed away. Landlords grew cautious. Within months, LuxUrban was in freefall—its reputation shredded, its stock gutted.
All because the central allegation—that the Royalton lease was a mirage—was false.
Obligations and Realities
The December 13 email shows LuxUrban did what any responsible company would have done: disclose a signed, material agreement. The mechanics of escrow and release conditions, raised in back-and-forth emails, may have created ambiguity about timing. It is the ordinary friction of commercial real estate transactions.
To twist that into evidence of deception was not just unfair; it was reckless.
Who Bears Responsibility?
The true scandal is not that LuxUrban disclosed the Royalton lease. It is that journalists and lawyers ignored readily available evidence to tell a story that destroyed a company. Bisnow’s coverage, in particular, reads reckless in hindsight—more interested in sensationalism than accuracy.
Class-action attorneys are no better. Their suits cast LuxUrban’s disclosures as intentional misstatements, but how can that claim stand when the landlord’s own counsel confirmed the lease was executed? These cases were built on sand, propped up by media soundbites, not facts.
The consequences are profound. Shareholders lost value. Employees lost jobs. A business model was tarnished. And for what? For a storyline that now collapses under the weight of documentary evidence.
Reclaiming the Narrative
This email does more than vindicate LuxUrban—it exposes how fragile corporate reputations are in the face of media pile-ons and legal opportunism. If one reputable attorney’s confirmation had been weighed properly, the arc of this story could have been different. Instead, a false narrative metastasized into existential damage.
There is a word for that: defamation. And those who fueled it—whether journalists too quick to print or lawyers too quick to sue—may yet face their own reckoning.
Conclusion
The Royalton lease was real. LuxUrban disclosed it because it was obligated to. The damage came not from corporate deception but from a reckless echo chamber that ignored facts in favor of scandal.
If there is a lesson here, it is that truth still matters. And those who drowned it out with noise owe an apology—not just to LuxUrban, but to every shareholder who paid the price for their carelessness.
