According to a lawsuit filed last week in San Francisco Superior Court, Childress’s June 13 trip to McDonald’s ended with “severe burns” after she was handed a cup with a lid that hadn’t been properly secured. When she tried to take a sip, the lid came off, drenching her legs, groin and stomach with hot coffee, according to the lawsuit, which does not specify the temperature of the spilled drink.
Childress immediately attempted to report the incident and asked to speak to a manager, but three employees “refused to help her,” according to the lawsuit. After an hour spent without anyone coming to her aid, she went to the emergency room, said Dylan Hackett, Childress’s attorney.
“What it comes down to is negligence on the part of McDonald’s,” Hackett told The Washington Post. He added that the incident left Childress with scarring, ongoing physical and emotional pain, and a slew of medical expenses.
McDonald’s did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment Tuesday evening. Peter Ou, the owner and operator of the franchise location that Childress visited, told Today that his “restaurants have strict food safety protocols in place, including training crew to ensure lids on hot beverages are secure.”
“We take every customer complaint seriously — and when Ms. Childress reported her experience to us later that day, our employees and management team spoke to her within a few minutes and offered assistance,” Ou told the program in a statement. “We’re reviewing this new legal claim in detail.”
It’s not the first time McDonald’s has faced complaints from customers about its hot food items.
In July, a jury in Florida awarded $800,000 in damages to the family of a 7-year-old girl who got second-degree burns after a Chicken McNugget fell on her thigh in 2019. Nine years ago, a California woman sued the company after the “negligently, carelessly and improperly” placed lid on her coffee came off, causing the liquid to spill and burn her. And in the well-known 1992 case, coffee as hot as 190 degrees soaked into Stella Liebeck’s cotton sweatpants, sending her to the hospital for eight days as she underwent skin grafting.
“The hot coffee temperature has already been litigated before. … So it’s an ongoing issue, it seems like, with McDonald’s,” Hackett said, adding that Childress hopes the case makes McDonald’s rethink its food items’ high temperatures.
In 1994, a jury in New Mexico unanimously decided to award Liebeck $2.7 million in punitive damages for the coffee spill that burned 16 percent of her body. Though the jury heard evidence of at least 700 reports filed about burns and about a coffee temperature that could cause severe injuries in just a matter of seconds, Liebeck was widely villainized in the court of public opinion, said John Llewellyn, a communications professor at Wake Forest University.
“It became about a woman, coffee and millions of dollars, and then people took that as a license to say that the courts are crazy and plaintiffs are greedy,” he said. “But what was missing in this whole equation was the context behind the verdict, which was wiped out from the news.”
The case became “the poster child of the question: How do people get a story so phenomenally wrong?” Llewellyn said. Soon, campaigns pushing for tort reform used the hot-coffee case as a prime example of a frivolous lawsuit — even though McDonald’s admitted in court that it had known about the risk of burns from its hot coffee for over a decade, he said.
As Childress’s case plays out, Llewellyn said he hopes people consider the facts this time around.
“Last time, the what and the why didn’t make it into the story,” he said. “It was, ‘Holy cow, $2.7 million and hot coffee,’ but not, ‘Why would a jury find that a corporation had been insensitive to their customers?’ I hope this time we just avoid a rush to judgment and stop to say, ‘Is there some set of circumstances under which this might make sense?’”
