Susan Saladoff’s film documentary Hot Coffee tries to challenge commonly held views about the U.S. legal system and several of the related criticisms of it. She uses the famous McDonald’s coffee case to debunk some of the most prevalent assumptions about the litigation there and the motives often attributed to those who bring legal action.
While the movie features three other story lines it highlights the events surrounding Stella Liebeck, a then 79-year-old Albuquerque, New Mexico woman who was severely burned in 1992 from a cup of McDonald’s coffee that spilled over her lap. Both she and the American civil justice system received enormous ridicule after a jury in the state awarded her $2.86 million in compensatory and punitive damages.
Disputed notion of “frivolous lawsuits”
But Saladoff argues in her film that Liebeck’s case was not one of the “frivolous lawsuits” that critics for years contended. The woman’s burns were serious and painful and she was not seeking to obtain as much money as possible from McDonald’s, Saladoff told an audience during a screening at the National Press Club in Washington.
According to Hot Coffee, Liebeck initially asked McDonald’s to pay the difference between her medical expenses and what was not covered by her insurance, an amount coming to $20,000, which the company refused to do in a settlement offer. The woman was a passenger in her grandson’s car which he had stopped after they went through the drive-in window at an Albuquerque McDonald’s.
It was when she tried to remove the lid to add cream and sugar that she spilled the coffee, severely burning her skin and groin area and requiring hospitalization and later skin grafts. Liebeck’s claim was that the coffee temperature posed an unreasonable risk of injury. No cup holders were in her grandson’s car at the time of the incident.
The position of McDonald’s was that it needed to sell its coffee at a minimum of 180 degrees so customers would not find it was too cold when they purchased it, Saladoff noted. The company stated it had strengthened its coffee cups and included a warning that McDonald’s should not be held responsible for any burns resulting from external forces if the coffee was handled carelessly.
At the lawsuit trial in 1994 evidence was introduced that more than 700 instances of burns from coffee of differing severity were reported to McDonald’s over a 10-year period. Some of those cases had led to legal action. A consultant for McDonald’s pointed out that 700 burns in 10 years represented just 1 injury per 24 million cups sold.
McDonald’s plaintiff found slightly at fault
The jury in the Liebeck case found that McDonald’s was 80% at fault and she was 20% at fault. Jurors awarded her $200,000 in compensatory damages (later reduced to $160,000) for her injuries and an additional $2.7 million in punitive damages (later reduced to under $500,000). However, the precise final settlement remains unknown to the public because Liebeck and McDonald’s entered into secret negotiations as an alternative to appeal. She died in August 2004 at age 91.
One of her reasons for making the film, Saladoff said at the Press Club, was to demonstrate the efforts made to limit the hearing of cases like Liebeck’s and the awarding of damages as well as to curtail both consumer rights and protections.
Since her film was shown at the 2011 American Film Institute’s SilverDocs documentary festival and aired on HBO, critics have pointed out Saladoff is a former trial attorney with 25 years of experience and say she is trying to defend the nation’s tort system. Much of the criticism of the McDonald’s case came well before the movie was made.
“The tort system is meant to deter wrongdoing; the mistake of the left is the increasingly successful attempt to make the main purpose compensating the injured, and redistributing wealth from wealthier bystanders tangentially related to the victim who haven’t done anything wrong,” Ted Frank wrote in “Urban legends and Stella Liebeck and the McDonald’s coffee case in,” in Overlawyered, October 20, 2005.
Saladoff counters that the Liebeck suit was an attempt to seek appropriate redress for a serious harm, not simply about a clumsy woman trying to extract millions from a wrongly accused corporation. The tort system, in her view, is a means to ensure that companies pay attention to product safety and face the possibility of product liability if accidents occur.
Reagan discounts legal case regarding phone booth injury
To make a point in Hot Coffee about what the customary frivolous lawsuit argument has been, Saladoff included footage of then President Ronald Reagan calling for tort reform, citing the case of a man in Los Angeles who was struck by a drunk driver and seriously injured while making a call from a roadside phone booth. Regan make light of the man also suing the phone company along with the driver.
But the film adds that the phone booth was erected next to a highway and had been hit by cars several previous times, damaging its door which was never sufficiently repaired. The man in this case couldn’t open the stuck door in time to get out of the way of the oncoming car.
Two of the other cases presented in the movie involve a Nebraska couple facing a lifetime of medical care for their son who suffered brain damage at birth due to medical negligence with their state’s cap on damages, and a former Mississippi Supreme Court Justice prosecuted by the Bush Justice Department for bribery due to the loan arrangement he made to finance his own re-election ads after prevailing over a U.S. Chamber of Commerce campaign to unseat him.
Probably the most controversial case in the film is that of former Halliburton employee Jamie Leigh Jones who alleged she was drugged and gang-raped by another employee while working for defense contractor KBR in Iraq in 2004. In a development after the film’s completion but which Saladoff addressed at the Press Club, a Texas jury in July 2011 rejected Jones’s claims, holding that the sex between her and the other employee was consensual. KBR is seeking to recover more than $2 million in attorney fees and court costs from Jones.
Saladoff said she still believed Jones was telling the truth but couldn’t identify all her alleged attackers at the trial. The judge didn’t allow introduction of the previous sexual activity of the accused but did allow the past partners of Jones in evidence. “I don’t think she would’ve spent six years [trying to get her case heard in court] otherwise.”
Source:
- Comments of Susan Saladoff during screening of her documentary Hot Coffee, National Press Club, Washington, D.C., September 12, 2011
- Nick Farr, “Spill the Beans: The Truth Behind Susan Saladoff’s ‘Hot Coffee’ Documentary,” Abnormal Use blog, January 24, 2011
- Ted Frank, “Urban legends and Stella Liebeck and the McDonald’s coffee case, Overlawyered, October 20, 2005
- Stephanie Mencimer, “Why Jamie Leigh Jones Lost Her KBR Rape Case, Mother Jones, July 8, 2011
John Seidenberg - John Seidenberg has worked on newspapers, newsletters, radio news, and produced specialized news publications as well as freelance ...
