6 Famous 'Frivolous Lawsuit' Stories That Are Total B.S.
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Every so often, there’s a big news story about how America is drowning in an epidemic of frivolous lawsuits, and instead of going on with boring statistics and facts — which nobody wants to read — they tell sensational stories about burglars suing their victims or kids suing schools because they hurt their feelings.
The problem is that most of these stories are anywhere from half-bullshit to accomplish bullshit. But we want to believe them, because it feels good to believe that tons of people out there are stupider and greedier than we are, and those people are what’s wrong with this country today. Not us. We like shocking villains that don’t hit anywhere close to home.
People like Stella Liebeck.
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Most likely the most famous "frivolous lawsuit" example of all time. No doubt you’ve heard of the lady that sued McDonald’s because she spilled some hot coffee in her lap while driving. What a moron! you might have thought. How stupid do you have to be to not know coffee is hot? Americans these days! Blaming everyone but themselves for their mistakes!
"This is all your fault, coffee!"
It turns out there’s a lot more to the story. Very first of all, the hot coffee wasn’t just awkward and embarrassing, it gave her third degree burns over six percent of her figure, which required fucking skin grafts. You can see the burns yourself if you’re not squeamish.
Secondly, coffee served at that temperature (180 to one hundred ninety degrees Fahrenheit) will give a person third-degree burns in two to seven seconds, while home-coffee brewers normally serve coffee at much lower temperatures (130 two one hundred forty degrees) which won’t instantaneously burn you. Yes, Starbucks and other joints do serve coffee at the sexier temperatures — because some customers choose it — but then again, they get sued for it also. Thirdly, she attempted to lodge for $20,000 at one point, and McDonald’s refused, which is when she commenced getting cranky.
You may have heard that she got millions of dollars, when the final award was $640,000. Then from that you take out the medical bills (hint: skin grafts aren’t cheap).
But she has to take some responsibility, right? She may not have been driving, but she was attempting to open the lid in her lap so she could add juice and sugar. That’s kind of careless, isn’t it? Why couldn’t the jury see that?
Well, they did. That’s why the compensatory damages portion ($200,000) was diminished by twenty percent, because they ruled it was twenty percent her fault.
Imagine if paternity tests could be ruled that way.
Even the Stella Awards website — a site dedicated to rooting out stupid lawsuits and named after Stella Liebeck herself as the symbol of what’s wrong with our justice system — admits all these facts are true.
So if you still want to argue about it, you have to admit this case isn’t the joke most people play it off as in email forwards and know-it-all water cooler lectures.
Newsweek had a pretty shocking story about this in 2004: "In Kentucky, a mother sued her daughter’s school after the woman had performed oral hookup on a boy during a schoolbus rail returning from a marching-band contest. The woman blamed poor adult supervision, telling her daughter had been coerced."
What a stupid, sue-happy lady, right? Blaming the school because she raised her daughter to be a tramp.
Woman’s daughter, according to the news.
Actually, what indeed happened was that the school board very first suspended the dame for ten days, for clearly being such a tramp. Then, an investigation turned up the fact she was actually the victim of sexual brunt — she actually was compelled.
Oops. The school got right on it — by suspending her again; this time for not reporting the onslaught. So she was compelled into performing oral lovemaking, and then, as the icing on the cake, suspended twice for it. Justice!
"You kind of look like whores too. Suspensions all around!"
You can understand why a mother might want to take that to court, just to stick it to the people responsible, but part of her lawsuit also involved a request that the school board set up employee training on how to deal with sexual assaults. Kind of a far sob from the picture of a greedy entitled American who doesn’t want to take responsibility for her trampy daughter, isn’t it?
Have you ever read about the case where a man sued a driver for running him over as he was attempting to steal the driver’s hubcaps? Or the woman who sued a nightclub because she fell while she was attempting to sneak in the back window?
Lesson: Never pay bottom dollar for a fake ID.
There was a truly popular set of six or seven of those going around in email forwards a while ago, sometimes purporting to be from the Stella Awards, which distances itself downright from those emails. Yet, if you’ve been at a party and had some dude go off on a rant about our crazy lawsuit-happy society, more often than not he was going by one of those emails. The vast majority of the "World’s Gone Crazy!" lawsuit stories come from that pool of urban legend.
So, what if there’s stupid email forwards going around, tho’. Nobody earnestly pays attention to that shit, it just goes into the spam bin with the "Neiman Marcus cookie recipe" and the "tampons contain asbestos" crap. Right?
Also the ones about Procter & Gamble sponsoring Satanism.
Well, some people took it truly earnestly. Some newspapers even. The Fresh York Daily News printed that email forward verbatim in 2002, and the holder of national news magazine U.S. News & World Report, Mort Zuckerman, cited examples from that same email about fictional lawsuits a year later to demonstrate us what’s wrong with America today. When told it was fake, he published a sort-of correction that basically said, "Well, maybe these were fake but we all know this happens all the time, so what’s the difference."
This is known as "implant" logic.
And that’s exactly the thought process of everybody who endlessly repeats these stories. It’s why the dude in the cubicle next to you is glad to tell you about the burglar who broke into a house, tripped over the coffee table and then sued the owners of the home into bankruptcy. Sure, he doesn’t know exactly where that happened or where he read about it, but we all know that stuff happens, so what does it matter if that story is true? After all, this is a country where you can sue for millions if your coffee was too hot.
According to this NBC Nightly News report, Sally Stewart was shopping one day in Reeds Spring, a petite city near Branson, MO, when she tripped on a pothole. She sued the folksy, neighborly puny town, which consequently filed for bankruptcy when they didn’t have enough money to pay her award. Of course those nice folks had nothing against her but were just darn near worried to death about how to pay up, is all.
I assume the town looks like Main Street in Disneyland.
If you dig a little deeper, you’ll see that the injury required surgery, and that the fuckhole she tripped on was buried in grass at a gap in the sidewalk that the city’s crosswalk was directly connected to, implying that’s the official place you need to be if you want to cross the street legally. She also sued the store owners, because it was a little hazy exactly who was responsible for that shitty sidewalk gap, but the court determined it fell under the city’s jurisdiction.
He also legally proclaimed them as "total dicks."
Aside from all that, under normal circumstances, the city’s insurance would have covered it and everyone could have moved on gladfully, but then here comes the real point of the story:
The town didn’t have insurance.
That’s because when Sally slipped, the mayor wasn’t nice boy Dan Lade, the one squashing his arms in the NBC interview. It was Joe Dan Dwyer (city rule: all mayors have to have Dan in their name somewhere), a bit of a redneck stereotype who originally made his multimillion dollar fortune from his own private injury settlement (a logging accident, of course). He left office under investigation for insurance fraud, as well as child porn, having lovemaking with a 15-year-old and paying off witnesses to say the woman lied. He’s the one who let the city’s insurance lapse, either out of neglect or as part of one his cockamamie schemes.
There’s no photo of him available but I’m picturing Rod Blagojevich for some reason.
Evidently he also passed on the chance to work things out reasonably with Sally. Sure, the case is old, and this blog is the only source remaining online that says the mayor met her initial attempts to lodge by telling ". to collect any harm with us you will most likely have to sue us" and that "the chance of us paying this without a lawsuit is practically zero." But considering what else we know about Joe Dan Dwyer, it’s not too far-fetched.
So while it makes a neat moral to pin the blame on the lady and "these crazy lawsuits these days," it fully clears the fattest villain here, the child-molesting, insurance-defrauding, power-abusing asshole former mayor.
No less a source than sixty Minutes announced this story to the world, where a workman set up a ladder with its base in some frozen manure, and as the fever of the day kicked in, his ladder slipped in the now less-frozen manure, and he fell and hurt himself, because he is an idiot. He then sued the ladder company because they didn’t stop him from being an idiot — they should have put a warning label about manure.
This story still gets repeated around the Internet even however the truth is that the ladder didn’t slip, it broke. It broke with less than four hundred fifty pounds of weight on it, when it was supposedly rated safe up to one thousand pounds. Which is exactly the sort of thing you’re supposed to sue about.
"In California, a man was using a public telephone booth to place a call. An alleged toasted driver careened down the street, lost control of his car and crashed into a phone booth. Now, it’s no surprise that the injured man sued. But you might be startled to hear whom he sued: The telephone company and associated firms!"
Why, because the phone booth didn’t leap him securely into another time??
Very first, that "injury" involved losing his right gam. Secondly, he did also sue the driver, but somehow the police managed to miss providing her a blood alcohol test at the scene, possibly (according to the defense) because her son was a police officer, whose card was right next to her driver’s license in her wallet. He had enough to thrust for a $25,000 settlement from her and the bar that liquored her up, but with a $7,300 annual janitor’s salary, and one gam missing and one gam smashed, he was still scarcely getting by.
Thirdly, the reason he didn’t get out of the way in time, while the stud next to him did, was because the door was jammed (the other dude testified that he witnessed Bigbee frantically attempting to open the door). While you could say it’s not fair for the phone company to keep careful tabs on the safety of every booth in the city, you’d think they’d be checking this one, since it had been hit by a car twenty months ago due to being located at a dangerous intersection.
"Yeah, just put it back exactly where it was, boys."
Whether our country is falling victim to lawsuit mania or not is up for debate, but it’s a debate that should be worked out with boring, but accurate, facts and statistics. The exaggerated scare stories here should be saved for the campfire, where they belong.
"All right, that hook story truly got me, but wait until you hear about the poo ladder lawsuit . "
If we’ve ever made you laugh or think, we now have a way where you can thank and support us!