You may think it should work like that, but AFAIK it’s not how punitive and exemplary damages actually work. If compensation were generally limited to actual damages, then any sufficiently rich person or company would have carte blanche to act negligently or abusively with no appreciable consequences.
55 million is a punitive amount. People are getting more and more intolerant of companies that don’t take their privacy seriously. So part of this is sending a message to the next guy.
I can’t even count the number of times the hotel registration clerk has given me my room number out loud, and given me directions to it while I stand within earshot of at least half a dozen other people. It’s as bad as the folks at the doctor’s office who make you stand at the check-in window and speak out loud what your problems are to the rest of the waiting room.
So 55m might be more than Erin Andrews “deserves” for this, but it’s not all about her, it’s also about making it clear that hotel are responsible for handling their guest’s information better than they do.
Eh, fuck him.
That’s a good point. But a point that still adds up to FAR below 49 percent or $55 million.
Again, good point. But, again, $55 million is just plain ludicrous.
Has a celebrity that has been stalked in their own home ever tried to find out how the stalker found out where they lived and sued those individuals?
Bus tours of Hollywood homes, maps of the stars homes, whitepages.com?
Seems like the hotel was found liable simply because they gave away her location. The creep did the rest of the work on his own.
Do people really have the “right” to have their physical location information private at all times?
Meh. You’d probably be sniveling if she got just one million.
I guess, for me, I’m wondering to what extent does a hotel have to provide privacy? I understand that as a business decision, it is a sound policy and hotels should provide privacy, but to what extent do they have to?
If someone googles my name, finds out where I live, then does something bad, is Google 49% to blame?
Without knowing the hotel’s profits, I wouldn’t presume to say whether $55 million is appropriate for punitive and exemplary damages. It could be too much, or not enough, or just right.
A quick search (through, ironically enough, the aforementioned Google) took me to the uslegal.com webpage, wehre it states that “Innkeepers and patrons have reciprocal obligations and duties. The owner is under a duty to furnish proper accomodations, and to exercise proper care for the safety and peaceful stay of the guest, while the guest must exercise due care to refrain from any disruptive or offensive conduct.”.
So I guess that failing to provide said safety, more so being unwilling part of said breach of safety, counts as a breach of contract, which wouldn’t be the case with Google, but could happen in some websites that promise anonymity, like, say, Amazon.
Most places of business have liability insurance. If connecting a phone call to a guest’s room can cost a hotel 55 million than the price of liability insurance will go up for every hotel. This will result in higher costs to those who use hotels regardless of what hotel they stay at.
That any amount of money was awarded just shows how broken the tort system is.
What wouldn’t have been ludicrous in your estimation? And how would you arrive at this hypothetical non-ludicrous figure?
This…or that.
Yeah, insurance money ain’t free. And neither is gubment money. But it is amazing how many people seem to not grasp this basic concept.
I considered for a while how I was going to respond to this, I think what I am going to say is yes, if you feel that you were violated by a sex crime, then I absolutely support you if you pursue a lawsuit against the offender for punitive damages. I hope you don’t mind me adding the qualifier of “sex crime” since it’s really a different kind of violation, and clearly relevant in this case.
Punitive damages, as I understand it, are to send a message to the negligent parties (correct me if I am wrong, I don’t know the ins and outs of punitive damages). In this case, it had to be a big number, otherwise where is the ‘punishment’? It had to send a strong message to the hotel, to all hotels really, that they need to do more to protect their guests. Reading the waitress statement re: comments that the hotel owner, drive home that point even more, in my opinion.
I can hardly believe that three pages in, the debate seems to be about the “trauma of having her picture/body on the internet,” and very little thought given to the psychological effect of never being able to feel that you are alone and not being watched, anywhere at any time. Obviously at the time, in that hotel room, she likely felt reasonably safe and private, as we all would, and do. Can you imagine never being able to let your guard down, even behind closed doors? Sure, the images from this incident were grainy and blurry and probably not terribly embarrassing; but what about next time? Want to visit with a romantic partner and engage in something explicit like normal people are able to do without fear of having it broadcast to the world? Nope, not without setting the mood by checking all the walls for pinholes and looking behind the pictures and covering the peephole and turning the TV around and whatever else someone might have been able to pay off a cleaning lady to let them in to hide something in.
The psychological effect of violation is immense. Any of you ever had your house broken into? Even more mundane, I once had a fake parking attendant literally take my money and run ($20) at a downtown parking lot once; and not only was I furious and anxious and all kinds of feelings at the time, but for a long time afterwards it affected me negatively when I encountered similar situations. I felt like a naive idiot, and I realize that yes it was partly my fault, and I learned a lesson. But it’s not really naivete to expect to take a shower in a hotel without the front desk having given someone your room number to record you. As has been said several times, hotels are aware (or should be aware) of these tricks and have (or should have) safeguards against them for LOTS of reasons, celebrity or not. Lots of people have stalkers, exes, jilted this-or-thats, “business associates,” or whatever. And these people could just follow them up the elevator and see what room they go into. But that’s not what happened, and it sounds like at a couple of points the hotel could have and should have done a better job.
Maybe. Or maybe it will go up for hotels that don’t even exercise a basic set of criteria for due diligence. As stated in this thread by a hotel employee, and from my own recollection of “house phones” at hotels, it’s basically bullshit for the house phone to display the number of the room you’ve been connected to. If that sort of thing isn’t on an industry (or hotel chain’s) standard security audit checklist somewhere, I’d be surprised.
I agree that they shouldn’t be extra-vigilant because she’s an ESPN sports reporter. I think they should be that vigilant all the time.
If I’m someone who has access to my company’s credit card database, and I click on a malware link that allows hackers to get my credentials and thus access to my company database, does my company completely escape liability because I was tricked and manipulated by those nasty hackers?
I think too much liability was put onto the hotel. Asking to be put next to someone else is a pretty common occurrence. Anytime a group of people are meeting at a hotel, it’s probably pretty common to want to be near each other. You might ask “Can you put me next to my dad?” or something like that. Handling that at the checkin desk is a convenience that I hope doesn’t go away.
What should be done is to enable guests to tell the hotel they want the heightened security. If the guest is flagged, then someone can’t ask for them by name when they call, ask to be put next to them, or even ask if they are staying at the hotel. That way the rest of us can still have the convenience of being able to ask to be put near someone else or call the hotel and ask to be put through to someone’s room by name.
Here’s my problem with 55 mil. Getting that amount of money is right up there with people/companies PURPOSELY doing shit they know is wrong/irresponsible and somebody dies or gets maimed for life.
As far as I can tell, IMO the hotel “maybe” acted suboptimally.
It’s like me getting 30 years for a bar room brawl that was a much the other guys fault as mine but when I punched him once he dropped dead and I’m in a cell next to some guy who is in for premeditated murder and he got 35 years.
I assume that Mrs. Andrews lawyers convinced the jury that the assets in the company she was suing were enough that the 55 millions reflected the punitive damages for the event. I don’t think it was some sort of random number.
I like this analogy.
Also, thanks to Go_Arachnid_Laser for the facts about what a hotel is obligated to provide.