Several years before she voiced her concerns that her husband was poisoning her, Tatiana Pino joined Florida’s lieutenant governor and other influential members of her Miami prayer group for a “Friendsgiving” potluck dinner. The meal had barely begun when guests rushed to the restroom due to a wave of food poisoning that several attendees later concluded was caused by the roasted Brussels sprouts Pino had brought to the party.
The guests were so sick that an ambulance crew rushed more than a dozen women, including Pino, to the hospital. They had come from the annual backyard dinner hosted by Lisa Lorenzo, a close friend of Pino’s and host of a Christian podcast.
“It was scary, we were dying like flies,” said Vicki Lopez, a partygoer who is now a Florida state representative. “At least 10 of us got sick. And it was instantaneous.”
The fateful dinner has raised fresh alarm bells in Pino’s inner circle following last week’s news that she had accused her estranged husband, prominent developer Sergio Pino, of poisoning her when they were living together. He has denied the accusation.
READ MORE: FBI Investigates Possible Link Between Real Estate Developer Sergio Pino and Threats Against Woman
The Miami Herald spoke with four people who attended Lorenzo’s home the night of the 2019 Friendsgiving potluck, plus a spokesperson for the U.S. senator. Marco Rubio, who arrived later that evening to check on his sick wife. Authorities never determined the source of the wave of illnesses that struck Lorenzo’s guests at that November gathering, but attendees said they believed, based on who ate the largest portion, it was likely Pino’s Brussels sprouts.
“The people who got sickest ate the most,” said one of those present.
Lorenzo’s party also shows how the Pino saga resonates in the highest echelons of local and provincial politics.
Among those attending the Nov. 22, 2019, dinner were Alina Garcia, now a Republican state representative running for Miami-Dade elections supervisor, and Viviana Bovo, the wife of Hialeah Mayor Esteban Bovo. Florida Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez had left early, so she was not present as several guests suffered from nausea, diarrhea and confusion, according to reports from attendees. But Nuñez went home with a plate of food from the buffet, prompting at least one guest to text her warning her not to eat anything from that night’s event, attendees said.
After the wave of illness spread among the women gathered, Rubio went to Lorenzo’s home to check on his wife, Jeanette Rubio, and an employee in his Senate office, who is also friends with Lorenzo.
A spokesman for Rubio confirmed the senator’s arrival at Lorenzo’s party on Monday.
“Senator Rubio went to pick up his wife from a women’s Bible study dinner after she called to say she was feeling ill. Fortunately, she did not require medical attention,” the spokesperson said.
Sergio Pino was also present at Lorenzo’s party after her guests fell ill. Tatiana Pino would later accuse him in a statement of poisoning her after she filed for divorce in April 2022.
Last fall, Sergio Pino acknowledged the health crisis at Lorenzo’s home when he made a statement in the divorce proceedings.
He testified that “a group of people” were hospitalized for what he understood to be food poisoning at a dinner party. Although he was not at the party, he said he was called to the house when guests began to feel sick, according to the affidavit. He then visited the hospital where his wife was and stayed there for about two to three hours. Sergio said he remembers Tatiana staying overnight in the hospital.
Video taken that night and shared with the Herald showed the street in front of the 7,000-square-foot home Lorenzo owns with her husband surrounded by at least six ambulances with flashing lights.
The incident prompted a state police investigation led by Nuñez’s security chief at the time, Florida Highway Patrol officer Joe Sanchez. Sanchez, now a Republican candidate for Miami-Dade sheriff, said Monday that he collected samples of the evening’s food offerings, including the Brussels sprouts, and sent them to a state facility for analysis.
“We did an investigation. We sent it to the forensic lab,” Sanchez said. “It came back negative” for anything that would explain why people were getting sick.
Sanchez said he did not have details about the findings and that an investigation report from the Florida Highway Patrol was not yet available.
He also said that after people got sick that night, there was no immediate reason to suspect Pino’s sprouts. “If I’m not mistaken, some people ate the sprouts and didn’t get sick,” he said.
There was no immediate comment from Gov. Ron DeSantis’ press office, which handles media requests for Nuñez.
The 2019 party offered a glimpse into Tatiana Pino’s life in the final years of her marriage to one of Miami’s most prominent developers. In her 2023 deposition, Pino called Lorenzo her best friend and said that Lorenzo had accompanied her to a Baltimore hospital the year before, where doctors revealed that Tatiana Pino had fentanyl in her system — a substance she said she had not ingested.
In a May 15 episode of Lorenzo’s podcast Faith with Friends, Tatiana Pino credited prayer with helping her cope with the end of a difficult relationship.
“Not only have I gone through relational suffering, I have gone through physical suffering,” she said. “But Jesus was there.”
Federal agents last week searched Sergio Pino’s home and the offices of his development company, both in Coral Gables. The Herald reported that both searches were part of an FBI investigation into Pino’s possible connection to threats against his wife.
For the past two years, Pino and his wife have been battling each other in a divorce case that is set to go to trial in July, according to Miami-Dade County court records. FBI agents are investigating whether Sergio Pino recruited a part-time worker at his home to hire three men to threaten his wife’s life after she filed for divorce in April 2022, people familiar with the FBI investigation told the Herald. The part-time worker and the three men have been charged in federal court in Miami with assaulting Tatiana Pino in a hit-and-run crash at her Pinecrest home and attacking her sister by setting three of her vehicles on fire.
It is not known whether the Friendsgiving gathering was viewed by investigators in the current Pino case. Lorenzo said she could not speak to the Herald because “authorities have asked me not to comment.”
Are Brussels sprouts to blame?
Attendees of Lorenzo’s 2019 dinner party described a gathering of more than three dozen women that began with prayer and guests expressing what they were thankful for that year. After food was served in a dining area in Lorenzo’s spacious backyard outside South Miami, several guests began to succumb to an illness that struck with alarming speed. Their calls to 911 brought more than a dozen ambulances to the house, attendees said.
Attendees who spoke to the Herald said medical authorities couldn’t say definitively what was making people sick. By comparing notes on who ate what, members of the group later concluded that Pino’s Brussels sprouts were the likely culprit, based on what happened to the women who had the largest portions of the vegetable dish.
In his 2023 statement, Sergio Pino said that the guests at the dinner party were people from Tatiana’s church community. He said that “everyone brought something” to the gathering and that he did not know whose dish was believed to have caused the illness.
“So you understand that they suspected the dish that my client brought?” asked Tatiana’s lawyer, Raymond Rafool.
“I have no reason to think so,” Sergio Pino replied.
Allegations of poisoning surface repeatedly in the statements of both Sergio and Tatiana, who stated that in 2022, after years of unexplained illness, doctors found fentanyl in her system.
Tatiana stated in her statement that she was convinced that her husband was poisoning her and that her symptoms disappeared as soon as she left the house where she lived with him.
While Sergio Pino acknowledged in his November statement that Tatiana “has been ill for a long time,” he flatly denied that he ever poisoned his wife. “I don’t do things like that,” he said.
“And who do you think poisoned my client when she was living with you?” Rafool asked.
“When Tatiana lived with me, no one poisoned her,” Sergio said.
Deanna Shifrin, Sergio Pino’s attorney, denied the poisoning allegations and pointed to comments Tatiana made in a December 2023 statement, in which she said no health care provider had concluded she had been poisoned.
Lopez, a Republican member of the Florida House of Representatives since 2022, fell ill at the 2019 party and said she was approached after the event by a state inspector who wanted to know what food and drinks had been served. In an interview Monday, Lopez said she was stunned by how quickly the illness spread through the group.
“I sat down at the table and I probably took two or three bites,” she said. “I started feeling dizzy. The next thing I knew, I was running to the bathroom to throw up.”
Lopez said she shared an ambulance ride to South Miami Hospital with Tatiana Pino, who she described as even sicker than she was. Doctors gave Lopez anti-nausea medication and let her leave around 3 a.m. She took an Uber home.
At first, Lopez said her group of friends didn’t know what foods were making them sick. But in the days that followed, they zeroed in on the Brussels sprouts based on what the people who got sick had eaten, including Lopez, who tasted Pino’s vegetable dish.
“I’ve had pretty bad food poisoning before,” she said. “I’ve never gotten sick this fast before.”
Miami Herald Editor Jay Weaver contributed to this report.
