CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Stella Liebeck is the woman who spilled hot coffee on her lap as she drove out of a McDonald's parking lot and later sued the company for roughly $20 million -- or $200 billion, or something like that.
That could be a typical example of what some people might say about the infamous mid-'90s lawsuit that elevated Liebeck, a frail 81-year-old, to the status of poster grandma for money-grubbers looking to take advantage of the legal system, Susan Saladoff, director of the recently released HBO documentary "Hot Coffee," said in a Gazette interview last week.
But most people are not aware that the scalding liquid Liebeck spilled on her sweatpants seared her skin and covered her legs in blackened third-degree burns reminiscent of Vietnam War napalm wounds.
And those same folks probably aren't aware that the burns hospitalized Liebeck for months; that she required several painful skin grafts, and that she never fully recovered from her injuries.
Still, others do not know that Liebeck was sitting in the passenger seat of the car when she spilled the coffee, and that her nephew, the driver, had pulled into a parking space in the restaurant's lot to organize the bags of food they had just bought.
Liebeck asked McDonald's to simply cover her medical expenses, and to make sure the coffee was not brewed so hot. The company offered $800 and eventually reduced the brewing temperature from 180 degrees to 170 degrees.
When she sued in 1995, a jury awarded her $2.7 million in damages, which a judge later reduced to about $640,000, according to Saladoff's documentary.
Saladoff visited Charleston last week as a guest speaker at the West Virginia Association of Justice Mid-Winter Convention and Seminar. She also hosted a screening of "Hot Coffee" at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation on Kanawha Boulevard.
The documentary, which Saladoff has been promoting around the country, seeks to expose the little-known methods corporations and lobbying groups use to discredit "frivolous lawsuits," manipulate judicial elections, influence legislation to cap damage awards on medical malpractice cases and surreptitiously deny consumers and corporate employees their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.
After the coffee spill case went public, McDonald's mounted a massive public relations campaign against Liebeck. Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld poked fun at her. Newspapers and TV stations largely bought into the case as frivolous, and the American public came away with the idea that Liebeck was a greedy monster, according to the film.
During the Gazette interview, Saladoff quickly scrambled to find an email sent to her by an advocacy group supposedly fronted by corporations, which listed this year's "Stella Award" winners.
"They're so insulting because they're made up after Stella Liebeck," Saladoff said. "They're the most ridiculous lawsuits in the country every year, and they're not even real cases."
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Stella Liebeck is the woman who spilled hot coffee on her lap as she drove out of a McDonald's parking lot and later sued the company for roughly $20 million -- or $200 billion, or something like that.
That could be a typical example of what some people might say about the infamous mid-'90s lawsuit that elevated Liebeck, a frail 81-year-old, to the status of poster grandma for money-grubbers looking to take advantage of the legal system, Susan Saladoff, director of the recently released HBO documentary "Hot Coffee," said in a Gazette interview last week.
But most people are not aware that the scalding liquid Liebeck spilled on her sweatpants seared her skin and covered her legs in blackened third-degree burns reminiscent of Vietnam War napalm wounds.
And those same folks probably aren't aware that the burns hospitalized Liebeck for months; that she required several painful skin grafts, and that she never fully recovered from her injuries.
Still, others do not know that Liebeck was sitting in the passenger seat of the car when she spilled the coffee, and that her nephew, the driver, had pulled into a parking space in the restaurant's lot to organize the bags of food they had just bought.
Liebeck asked McDonald's to simply cover her medical expenses, and to make sure the coffee was not brewed so hot. The company offered $800 and eventually reduced the brewing temperature from 180 degrees to 170 degrees.
When she sued in 1995, a jury awarded her $2.7 million in damages, which a judge later reduced to about $640,000, according to Saladoff's documentary.
Saladoff visited Charleston last week as a guest speaker at the West Virginia Association of Justice Mid-Winter Convention and Seminar. She also hosted a screening of "Hot Coffee" at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation on Kanawha Boulevard.
The documentary, which Saladoff has been promoting around the country, seeks to expose the little-known methods corporations and lobbying groups use to discredit "frivolous lawsuits," manipulate judicial elections, influence legislation to cap damage awards on medical malpractice cases and surreptitiously deny consumers and corporate employees their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.
After the coffee spill case went public, McDonald's mounted a massive public relations campaign against Liebeck. Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld poked fun at her. Newspapers and TV stations largely bought into the case as frivolous, and the American public came away with the idea that Liebeck was a greedy monster, according to the film.
During the Gazette interview, Saladoff quickly scrambled to find an email sent to her by an advocacy group supposedly fronted by corporations, which listed this year's "Stella Award" winners.
"They're so insulting because they're made up after Stella Liebeck," Saladoff said. "They're the most ridiculous lawsuits in the country every year, and they're not even real cases."
One of the cases claimed that a woman won a $780,000 verdict against a furniture store when she tripped over her own child while in the shop, breaking her ankle.
In another case, a man supposedly sued the owner of a vehicle that ran over his hand. The man was allegedly trying to steal the car's hubcap when his hand was crushed. All of the fake cases have been exposed on the rumor busting website snopes.com.
"Made up, all of these," Saladoff said. "And recycled every year and sent to millions of people."
The documentary's major theme centers on the issue of tort reform legislation -- or laws, according to Saladoff, that purport to curtail frivolous lawsuits but actually restrict citizens' rights to argue a case in front of a jury. Many people, as pointed out in the film's humorous "man on the street" segments, apparently believe a tort is some kind of pastry.
"They're fed the information in sound bites," she said. "In this society, it really means average folks give up their rights and corporations make more money."
"We're signing away our rights every single day," she said. "But the reason we don't know about it is because it hasn't happened to us yet.
Tort reform legislation in West Virginia is typified in the state's caps on non-economic damage awards in medical malpractice cases. About a decade ago, state lawmakers passed a bill that limits the damage award in such cases to $250,000, and $500,000 for cases involving wrongful death.
Advocates of the measure, dubbed the Medical Professional Liabilities Act, claim that the caps help stem rising medical malpractice insurance rates and keep doctors from moving to other states.
But according to Saladoff, a medical malpractice trial lawyer with about 25 years of experience, insurance companies favor caps because it allows them to plan how much they will have to spend on lawsuits in a given timeframe.
"The reason why insurance companies like caps is because it lets them plan better," she said. "When you have a cap, they know that this is [the] absolute maximum in a case that they're ever going to be subjected to."
To purchase a copy of "Hot Coffee," visit the film's website: www.hotcoffeethemovie.com.
Reach Zac Taylor at Zachary.Tay...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5189.
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