The controversial case surrounding a woman who was forcibly ejected by police from an Anselm Kiefer exhibition at Gagosian's West 24th Street gallery in January has quietly come to an end.

In May, Judge Daniels of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed the suit against Gagosian, alleging that the gallery could not be held responsible for the excessive force used by police to drag a middle-aged visitor from the gallery after she spoke out in defense of protesters at the exhibit. Three months thereafter, on August 11, the city settled its case with the woman, Ingrid Homberg, offering her $77,500. "She was happy with the outcome, and as in many of these cases, she was happy we had finally brought it to finality," Homberg's lawyer, Joel Berger, told ARTINFO.

The incident in question occurred a few days before Christmas in 2010, when a protest group called U.S. Boat to Gaza infiltrated Gagosian in the final days of Kiefer's exhibition of massive, Holocaust-inspired vitrines. The protesters were peacefully standing by the sculptures in shirts that read "Next Year in Jerusalem" — the show's title — in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, as part of a campaign to oppose the Israeli blockade of Gaza. After employees at the front desk called the police to oust the young demonstrators, Homberg, a German-American, spoke out to say they were harmless. When the officers arrived and asked her to leave along with the protesters, she refused to go. Then, according to several accounts, an officer named Salvatore P. Saetta grabbed her, knocked her to the gallery floor, and dragged her screaming in pain out of the gallery by the skin of her arm.

Homberg sued both the gallery and the police for "shock, debasement, fright, fear, humiliation, embarrassment, psychological and emotional trauma, physical and mental injury, pain and suffering," according to a statement issued by Berger.

Security camera footage appeared to be the evidence that clinched the Homberg settlement. The court issued a subpoena for the tapes, which showed "the last few seconds of the incident as Homberg was being dragged out," according Berger. (The initial confrontation between Homberg and the officers occurred outside the range of the cameras.) "The video showed her in a crouching position as if she were trying to get up from having been down, and showed an officer grabbing her arm in the exact place where she had bruising when she visited the hospital," said Berger.

The suit against Gagosian was dismissed because, as the judge pointed out, the gallery employees could not be held responsible for the excessive force used by police. Berger still believes Gagosian was sufficiently responsible to share liability because the employees "singled out Ms. Homberg as a person to be ejected from the gallery... when she shouldn't have been ejected in the first place." He acknowledged, however, that it is "a gray area in personal injury law as to the exact point at which someone like Gagosian would be responsible."

A spokesperson from the gallery did not immediately respond to a request for comment.