Andrea Nussinow, 64, of Tivoli, will instead pay a $1,750 fine, spend three years on probation, and complete 100 hours of community service, the Columbia County District Attorney’s office said.
Additionally, Nussinow was banned from owning any horses, though she was allowed to petition the court to possess two horses in the future, according to prosecutors. All 13 of Nussinow’s horses were seized in her July 2024 arrest.
“The horses in Ms. Nussinow’s care deserved better than the squalor and neglect in which she kept them,” District Attorney Chris Liberati-Conant said. “I anticipate she will lose her license to breed horses as a result of these convictions.”
Nussinow was convicted in late June on three counts of torturing or injuring animals/failure to provide proper sustenance, authorities said. She initially faced 13 counts in the case.
“Several of the horses were found to be emaciated with bones visible under their skin. Others showed a thick yellow discharge coming from their eyes,” the DA’s office wrote. “At least one of the horses suffered from an open leg wound seen covered with flies.”
Authorities had been investigating Nussinow for nearly a decade, and she was first arrested for animal cruelty in 2017. A grand jury refused to indict her in that case; she was arrested again in 2020, but those charges didn’t stick either, according to previous reports.
A Facebook account with Nussinow’s name and matching information has pushed back against details of the case, promising to share “the evidence concerning the individual horses, what the prosecution alleged, what the evidence actually showed, and which allegations resulted in acquittals.”
The account claimed the charges came from “complaints with people associated with my ex-tenant who had previously leased a barn from me on the farm.”
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