Woman sues Disneyland after Space Mountain gave her 'permanent vertigo'

A woman will begin a legal action against Disneyland Paris on Wednesday (22 February). She claims to have acquired a neurological disorder after riding on the park's Space Mountain rollercoaster, the Times reported.

The 27-year-old mother has been officially recognised as disabled since she attended Disneyland Paris in 2013. "It's as though she was on a boat every day," her lawyer Cyrille Bouchaillou said.

Bouchaillou has asked the court to instigate a medical examination to prove that disrorder was incurred as a consequence of the Space Mountain ride. He says the woman has had to give up dancing and riding her motorbike.

Bouchaillou claimed that Disneyland had offered his client €29,950 (£25,182, $31, 462) to settle the case outside of court. He described the sum as "insufficient", according to The Times.

Disneyland denies that it made made an out-of-court offer. A spokeswoman said: "The case is on-going and we cannot comment on it."

The park describes the Space Mountain attraction as a chance to "hurtle through the atmosphere" and to "dip and careen into the inky blackness".

The woman told her local newspaper, Le Courrier Picard: "I felt my head hit the safety harnesses. I couldn't move it. It felt like an eternity. At the end I had vertigo."

She added that she was still suffering four years later: "I have the impression that nothing is stable around me, that everything reels all the time."

A doctor told her she was suffering disembarkment syndrome, which usually affects people returning to shore after being on a boat: "He told me that in the shock of the attraction my inner ear was affected." She said that she suffered from permanent vertigo, so much so that she was "afraid to take my son in my arms because I might drop him".

The woman claims she nearly lost her job as a bank clerk because she was off sick so often. She only managed to keep her job after she was diagnosed as disabled.