The Best Fitness Platform to Train Anywhere!

How much damage can you do – to your body, your career, your life – when you step on to a faulty piece of exercise equipment? 

The plaster cast on Maya Meron’s arm tells the tiniest part of the story. A violinist who played with some of the world’s top orchestras, her left elbow was shattered when the adjustable bar on a Pilates reformer machine slipped out of its setting while she was in the downward dog yoga position, sending her arms in one direction and her legs in another.

Mother-of-three Maya, 45, knew on hearing the sickening crunch that her international career was probably over. But she could not possibly have foreseen the physical ordeal that lay ahead.

Her most recent operation, to repair nerve damage, has been the third on her arm. There have been two major operations on her abdomen because some of the ‘core’ muscles – ironically the ones that are supposed to benefit most from Pilates – were effectively shredded with the force of the fall nearly seven years ago.

She still uses a wheelchair intermittently because of the risk of tumbling. ‘I was effectively crippled,’ she says.

‘I’ve seen 100 doctors and been treated in London, Zurich and California. My twin sons were one when it happened. I wasn’t even able to lift them.’

Worse still, however, was the extent to which the accident destroyed her ‘perfect life’.

‘I had a wonderful marriage, a great social life, lots of travel. I was able to be very present with my children,’ she tells me from her New York home.

‘Suddenly, I couldn’t go out with my family for a walk in the forest. My husband took on the role of breadwinner, as well as doing all the cooking and the childcare.

‘He was a wonderful husband. He is a brilliant father. He loved me but our marriage couldn’t survive. It tore us apart, too. This ripped my family apart. If only it was just about an elbow.’

Maya made headlines last week when it was revealed she had won her protracted dispute with Heartcore, an upmarket fitness chain in whose Hampstead, north London, studio she suffered her injuries.

On the eve of a High Court decision, the company – whose clients have included Meghan Markle and Victoria Beckham – agreed to pay undisclosed damages in a confidential settlement.

It emerged Maya had to turn detective to compile ‘evidence’ that one of Heartcore’s fitness machines was to blame, going undercover to take photographs of the mechanisms that, she was convinced, had failed.

She tells me she also spent tens of thousands of pounds on private investigators and even paid her own health and safety experts, outraged that Heartcore was not only denying liability but refusing to engage with her questions about how this could have happened.

‘I couldn’t believe the world I ended up in,’ she says, ‘meeting a private investigator, putting on glasses with cameras in them.

‘It was James Bond stuff. I’m a musician but, suddenly, I was creeping about with a flashlight trying to take a picture of some stupid flawed machine.’

While Maya was single-handedly fighting a seven-year legal battle she was also going to war with the medical profession.

She says her abdominal injuries were so complex it took years to pinpoint the damage that had been done – but, at one point, it was dismissed as ‘psychosomatic’.

‘I laughed,’ she says, recalling the moment a Swiss doctor told her the physical symptoms she described must be in her head. ‘I thought, this is Kafka-esque. I was told they recommended me being admitted to a psychiatric unit.’

This diagnosis – proved incorrect when Maya was finally operated on in the US, revealing massive internal injuries behind the outer layer of abdominal muscle – had a devastating impact.

‘But the more I cried, the more I was painted as a hysterical woman who could not cope with the loss of her career and her life,’ she says.

Amid the trauma, the detective work, the pain and the debt she got into funding her investigation, her marriage crumbled.

She says that her husband Stefan-Peter Greiner, one of the world’s leading violin-makers, was at a loss over how to cope – with her and with the strain of shouldering all responsibilities.

‘What was my husband to do, faced with doctors saying “psychosomatic”? Of course, he believed the doctors and I don’t blame him for that. The pressure on both of us was overwhelming.’

She shows me images of a family portrait commissioned from an artist friend several years ago.

‘It took a year to complete and by the time he was finished my husband and I had separated,’ she says. ‘If I had been believed about the accident in the first place, and supported, the stresses would not have been so vast.’

Why is Maya speaking out today? She reveals that in negotiations with Heartcore, she was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement. She refused, agreeing only to keep financial specifics secret.

‘They wanted to gag me. No way. I want to speak about the impact it can have on a person’s life when something goes wrong with these machines,’ she says.

‘This is a multi-billion pound industry but so much about it isn’t regulated. There are still so many questions. Who is responsible for ensuring these machines are safe? Is it the council? Is it health and safety? I came up against all this.’

Born in Israel, Maya started playing violin at seven and went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

She met Stefan-Peter, a German, when he designed a violin for her. He had a studio in London, where they moved in 2013 with their toddler daughter. Their twin boys were born in 2018.

Like most professional musicians, Maya treated her body like an athlete. She ran regularly and did Pilates classes because it ‘strengthened the core’.

Since 2015, she had been to ‘about 150 classes’ run by a variety of instructors. Around 40 of them were after her twins were born.

‘They specifically advertise about being suitable for women postpartum,’ she says.

Then disaster struck on March 11, 2019. Reformer machines incorporate a sliding carriage on which you perform a series of exercises, which can be done lying down, kneeling or standing.

Resistance is provided with springs that can be added, and there are pulleys and straps to perform leg or arm movements.

There is also a bar that can be adjusted to different heights. Sometimes called the foot bar, it can support the hands for leaning positions, as in Maya’s case.

Midway through a class with a stand-in instructor it was this adjustable bar that gave way, sending Maya crashing down.

‘I’ll never forget the sound of bone breaking,’ she says. ‘I knew then my career was probably over. I was also aware of enormous force, almost like a punch, to my abdomen, but I couldn’t understand it because nothing made contact with my body.’

She lost consciousness. When she came to, she was being helped to her feet. Then she recalls being ushered from the room. The class continued without her. 

‘I believe they tried to cover it up from that moment,’ she says.

‘There were only two other people in the class and I didn’t know them. I only knew the first name of the instructor. I remember asking for an accident report – refusing to leave before I had one.’

With a bad break confirmed to her elbow, Maya had no option but to cancel all orchestral bookings.

Then, two days after the accident and before she’d considered legal action, she had a call from Heartcore’s owner Jessica Schuring (also known as Jessie Blum) ‘telling me they were not accepting liability. This was without any investigation. She was aggressive. There was no “How can we help?”. I was treated like a nuisance.’

She tried to contact potential witnesses. ‘It took me months to find 15 teachers I’d had classes with,’ she says. ‘One agreed to talk. He told me that this had happened before with those machines and explained what it was – the bar not clicking into place correctly.’

Maya took her findings to a legal adviser but as she hadn’t recorded the conversation with the instructor was told she didn’t have a case.

‘It would be their word against mine,’ she says. ‘This was a machine that was potentially dangerous and no one wanted to know.’ 

So began her one-woman fight. She started to research reformer machines, discovering that while Heartcore had originally used machines made by industry giant Sebastien Lagree, the firm was now using a version that Ms Schuring had designed. There are no internationally- agreed safety standards.

A key difference was that this version had the bar locking mechanism encased in a plastic cover, rather than fully visible to the user. Confusingly, Lagree’s machines were showing on the Heartcore publicity material. 

Maya had no images of the machine she had been on – hence engaging a private investigator, who ‘with his James Bond gadgets’ accompanied her to clandestine classes at Heartcore.

‘I was limping but no one seemed to care,’ she says. Still she was unable to pinpoint the machine she’d used. Later, she was allowed authorised access with a health and safety inspector (‘again, paid for by me’) and a lawyer. 

She claims representatives from Heartcore’s insurers were also present. It was on this visit that she noticed that a machine in a side room was exactly the same design as she had used.

‘I adjusted the bar as the instructor had told me [in the class], and it seemed to be in place, but when I put my weight on it, I flew across the room and they had to catch me. It was hugely embarrassing for them. Later, it turned out that had been the actual machine [I had been on],’ she says.

Amid all this, she was seeing a string of doctors about her arm and suffering severe abdominal pain and balance issues. She was aware of ‘weird bulging’ in her abdomen, which she initially put down to ‘simply not training’.

For a period they had decamped to Tel Aviv, to have the support of her family. Then they moved to Zurich, where her husband also had a studio. It was in Zurich that things became very dark.

Unable to function as the mother she wanted to be, Maya did ‘lose it, for a period. I became very depressed’.

It was at this point – four years ago – that she consulted the doctor who delivered the ‘psychosomatic’ diagnosis. Yet still she fought on.

‘It was only when I got in touch with a specialist in Santa Monica in California – and again, I had to pay for that, and it was hundreds of thousands of pounds – that he agreed to operate,’ she says.

The medical report, which The Mail on Sunday has seen, documents extensive damage to her abdomen and tearing to muscles deep in her core. 

‘The accident had shattered the main peripheral sensory nerve, but also damaged the motor nerve [in her abdomen]. That had been missed in an earlier operation,’ she explains.

This would be followed by that legal win, too – after a barrister neighbour agreed to support her (although it is important to note that Heartcore has never admitted liability). 

Jonathan Goldberg, the KC who helped her for free, says she was ‘a brilliant young musician of international standing who turned herself overnight into a competent private detective’. He adds: ‘Her resilience and courage over the last seven years have been an inspiration for me to watch.’ 

But it was too late to save her marriage.

A legal spokesman for Jessica Schuring, whose eight studios still use the machines, said: ‘The claim was resolved by Heartcore’s insurers on a commercial basis.

‘Heartcore remains committed to the safety and wellbeing of all its members and continues to review its equipment in accordance with industry standards.’

Maya and her husband have been separated for two years. Their children – now 15 and eight – split their time between them. She has secured a visiting research scholarship at a university in Indiana, focusing on music and cognitive neuroscience.

She is due to have her latest arm cast removed the day after our interview and is determined that she will play the violin again.

And her family? ‘My greatest wish is we find a way to heal from this horrendous ordeal we have been through. Now the stress of this case is over, there is hope.’