The documentary Hot Coffee premiered at Sundance Film Festival. It tells the story of Stella Liebeck. She was 79 years old. She made national headlines when she sued McDonald’s after spilling a scalding cup of hot coffee on her lap. The lawsuit had the whole country talking—and many laughing.
But what most people don’t know is that Stella suffered third-degree burns on 16 percent of her body. And you also may not know that corporations have spent millions of dollars distorting the story to promote tort reform and alter US’s justice system.
Stella Liebeck passed away in 2004 at the age of 91.
JUDY LIEBECK talking:
What really happened was that my nephew was driving the car, not my mother. They drove into a McDonald’s, got coffee and a meal, drove into the parking lot. There were no cup holders in the car, so my mother steadied the cup between her knees and peeled off the lid. The whole cup collapsed. McDonald’s required that their temperature be held around 187 degrees.
She went to the hospital. We thought, oh, she’s in for observation overnight, no problem. But she was in for eight days. She had third-degree burns.
She had skin grafts. when they started talking about skin grafts, that’s when she became concerned about her money, because she had moved from Tucson to Albuquerque. She wanted to buy a little house. And she thought all of her money would go, because Medicare was only going to pay 80 percent, and so she would have to pay 20 percent. And we started thinking, why is McDonald’s insurance not paying for the medical?
Chuck and I wrote a letter to McDonald’s, asking them to cover her medical and to check the temperature on the coffee, because it seemed not reasonable that someone would have this kind of an injury from a cup of coffee. They came back with an offer of—what was at that point $10,000 in medical, they came back with an offer of $800. And we were just appalled. We wrote another letter, hadn’t heard from them, started getting very angry about this whole situation, and contacted a lawyer, searched for a lawyer that had already had a case against McDonald’s.
a normal home brewer should be between 142 and 162. And of course, when you put it into a ceramic cup, the heat is dissipated. A hundred and eighty-seven degrees, you have two to seven seconds before you have a third-degree burn.
187 degrees was in McDonald’s manual. Coffee was to be held at all of their facilities at that temperature, worldwide. And the reason for that, we believe, is that the higher the temperature on the coffee, the longer the shelf life of the pot of coffee. So it was a business decision to do that. But it causes irreparable damage. At 142 to 162 degrees, you have 25 seconds to get away from a third-degree burn. It’s not going to happen.
McDonald’s sent the first letter, and saying this is what we’re going to have. And then, the person that we were working through said, “Please call me.” And they said, “Get a lawyer.”
And so, then McDonald’s decided that they wanted to go to jury trial. And the reason they did that, because New Mexico, up to that point, had never found positively for the plaintiff in a product liability suit, and that is a product liability suit. The decision is, in product liability, is that the product must be used—be able to be used in the way it was intended at the time of sale, or else there must be enough warning that you should do something differently with it. McDonald’s said, “I want to go here, because it’s never found. I want my line drawn in the sand.” And there was two court-appointed mediations that they didn’t come to. They wanted jury trial. They said that they wanted to have—McDonald’s wanted to be at jury to get the proper result, so they would no longer have this issue. This didn’t work out for them.
two days before the court case went to trial, there was a mediation. They sent no one to mediation. And our lawyer had said to us, “If they will settle for some amount of money, you know, $50,000 or something like that, would that be acceptable?” And we said, “That would be wonderful. That’s more than—you know, going to pay for the medical and that sort of thing.” And he said, “Well, I would give it to your mother, and I would call it a loss, as far as I’m concerned.” McDonald’s was not interested in that. They wanted to go to trial.
The jury was, at the last day, told, “You will consider punitive damages.” And when they did that, they said, “Well, what should we do for punitive damages, because obviously there isn’t culpability here?” The first thing they decided was that there was a 20 percent problem that Stella actually spilled the coffee on herself. They found that it was 25 percent her fault.
In the final decision, 30 days later, we went back into court with McDonald’s asking for the judgment to be thrown out because of a runaway jury. The judge said, “You came into court. You showed what you were. And we were incensed by that, essentially.” But he did say, “You thought you saw a light at the end of a tunnel. You did not know it was attached to a train.” His words. And then he turned to us and said, “I have the authority to reduce this amount of punitive damage to three times compensatory, and I am exercising that.” And so, that’s what he did. So when we walked out of court, the $2.7 million had been reduced to three times compensatory, and then that was the end of the case.
the week before this happened, she dug out a palm tree in Tucson, she painted a ceiling. A very, very, very strong woman.
After this happened, she never got to a point where she could—if her little dachshund dug a hole in her stones in the backyard, she couldn’t take a rake—and it was very difficult for her to even cover that up. So she never regained the quality of life she had before.
– from democracynow.org
Lisa and Mike Gourley, parents of twin sons, Colin and Connor. Colin was born with cerebral palsy because of medical malpractice during childbirth.
Lisa and Mike Gourley talking:
I was about 36 weeks along with the boys, and I had noticed a decrease in movement. And I reported that to the doctor, and she dismissed it. She said, “You know, don’t worry about it. This is—there’s two babies in there. There’s not a lot of room to be moving around.” And she elected not to do any further testing. And so, I went home, and two more—two days had passed, and the movement had become less and less, and I became—I was very concerned and went back to the—called the doctor’s office, and they scheduled me in about three hours later. And I went in and then waited in the waiting room for about another hour, and they did an ultrasound and revealed there were significant problems, that they needed to deliver them right away. And it took another—about another hour and 15 minutes to do an emergency C-section. So then, when they were born, and there were—neither one of them were breathing. They rushed them off to intensive care. And then the news came back that, you know, they had—they were in a lot of trouble. And it was about five days later that we found out that there was severe brain damage. And then we realized, you know, all those minutes were very important,
And I had had a picture perfect pregnancy. You know, they had done an ultrasound two weeks prior, and they were—everything was completely normal. So, she, instead of—I mean, it would have taken a few minutes, and they could have done an ultrasound, and they would have determined that they needed to be delivered right away, and there wouldn’t have been any problems.
We later found out that Dr. Michelle Knolla had been sued before, two times before, and settled out of court. And then she was actually sued after our case.
after Colin was born, there was a lot questions, like any parent would have, of what happened, how does this happen. You know, our medical system in the U.S. is the best in the world, so—and I didn’t understand how they wouldn’t have monitored it. She was 36 weeks when she went in to that visit on Monday. That was 36 weeks. So, it was my understanding there should have been an ultrasound by standard of care that day.
So, as this happened and we were trying to piece it together and we were dealing with, you know, all the things that are going through your head of, you know, how is this going to work—I mean, how is he going to be? Is he going to live? Is he going to—you know, is he going to die? So you start—you know, as any parent, like I said, you start wondering what happened. So, and we weren’t getting any real answers. They don’t want to give you any real clear-cut answers—“Well, this is what happened.” So, we started asking questions, started getting evasive answers.
So we finally ended up, after a couple years, talking to a lawyer, and they referred us to a lawyer in Omaha that was a doctor and a lawyer. And he was able to kind of explain what really happened and put it together for us. And then it came out that there was things that they should have done that they didn’t do and that they didn’t meet the standard of care, and that was—they’re liable for that, so.
when you bring a lawsuit like this, you have to sue the doctor, you have to sue their employer. If they’re part of a group, you have to sue that. You have to sue the hospital. You have to sue everybody. Otherwise, they’ll just point the blame at somebody else that’s not in the suit.
The jury found Dr. Knolla and her group negligent, and they awarded Colin $5 million for medical and $625,000 for pain and suffering. And in the state of Nebraska, there’s a cap. So, the cap—there was a total cap on everything, and his projected medical expenses are—were $12.4 million.
this cap like we have in Nebraska, that caps both your economic and non-economic damages, there’s only four states—three that do it, totally, and Colorado kind of has a way around it if the—like in our case, if the judge would have decided in Colorado that it was—the cap was unconstitutional, he could have thrown out their cap and allowed the verdict to stand. But in other states, Indiana and Virginia have hard caps.
what we did, our attorney, right after the decision came back, we went before the judge and had a hearing and said it’s unconstitutional, you know, to take away the money he needs for his medical bills. And, you know, the rest of his life, he’s never going to be able to work. And the judge came back and said it was unconstitutional to do that. It violated his right to a jury trial. And at that point, the doctor and the insurance companies appealed the case to the Nebraska Supreme Court. And two years—it took two years for the case to go and to be heard, and then it took 15 months for them to come back with a decision. And what they did is they reversed the lower court’s decision and said the cap is constitutional.
CONNOR GOURLEY: It’s not the average life. You know, it’s helping him all the time, being there. It’s just like, why? Why, you know? If they have so much money, why can’t you just help someone out? And why do they have these for other people? I mean, people get hurt all the time, and it doesn’t affect them until they’re hurt, you know?
what ended up happening with us, our situation, is they—Colin—we had insurance with my husband’s employer, and then he lost his job. And I was trying—I couldn’t get Colin insurance, because they would only insure the three of us because of his pre-existing conditions and surgeries and therapies and, you know, everything. And so, he ended up on Medicaid. There’s a medically handicapped children’s waiver that helps take care of the medical. the taxpayer pays. It protects the corporations.
the doctors had plenty of insurance. Her group and the organization that owned her group, they had millions of dollars in insurance to cover this kind of thing. And they paid their premiums, and the insurance company is contracted, and they have an obligation to take care of these kind of things. But the tort laws just let them free—go free and keep their money, and the taxpayers have to step up and pay for
– from democracynow.org