Because for some unknown reason you can’t get it through your head that the boyfriend didn’t show up until hours into the incident. Before that time she had already consented to being strip searched and had sat naked in the office for hours. Even when the boyfriend was there the girl talked to the caller on the phone a number of times. It sure sounds like like she thought that the caller was a cop, and that she had no choice but to comply. That sounds like being tricked to me.
I don’t think McDonald’s has a responsibility to train every single one of it’s employees to every single possible situation they could find themselves in. The manager’s actions in this case (probably) violated numerous company rules and regulations. Nothing in any training manual or company guide book would suggest to a manager that this was a remotely appropriate course of action, and the manager was fired immediately.
Is it really the responsibility of McDonald’s to specifically ban every negative action that a manager might take no matter how astronomically stupid it is? Let’s face it. McDonald’s isn’t exactly hiring the cream of the crop to be their assistant managers. With the number of franchises they have and the poor quality of their employees I’m sure that there are thousands of actions taken by managers that anyone with a lick of common sense would know is unacceptable. It’s completely unreasonable to expect that they tell every manager not to do every stupid action a McDonald’s employee has done.
I will modify my original post to say that if the hoax was a successful hoax which was known about beforehand, or one which exploited a little-known technical or safety quirk (such as pretending to be a deep fryer repair person, and encouraging a person to do something very obscure and unsafe), then McDonald’s should have had a responsibility to warn stores. My dispute is that this act is so egregious, so insane, so over the top, and so in opposition to the basic morals and human behaviour safeguards which average people are expected to have, that it’s prima facie unbelievable that a functioning human being would fall for it. That is the crux of my argument - not that McDonald’s has no responsibility to warn against imminent danger or reasonably hazardous practices, but that this danger was wholly unexpected because for it to work required a chance alignment of the Planets of Stupidity and Evil.
In any event, I’ll bet that McDonald’s has a memo out about it now…
They gave the criminal scumbag more than a million dollars.
Imagine it. Through your own stupidity, you assist willingly in the sexual assault of a terrified girl. The result? Jackpot! Is this fiction, or reality?
I don’t know how anyone can be proud of that trial outcome. It almost makes me feel dirty just reading about it.
Apparently, McDonald’s did try to inform managers about the hoaxes.
Out of curiosity, would it matter if the store was a franchise instead of company owned? Also, it is completely ridiculous that McDonald’s has to pay either of these people a god damn cent.
I am still not fully decided on my position on that subject, and in honesty have not thought about it for a while. It is a more difficult tort example than first meets the eye, that I feel could have/should have gone either way.
I thought it was a well known aspect of this case that the hoax was known about by McD’s management and their preventative measures had been inadequate, which was the major aspect in their culpability. I remember reading about it in a thread here some time ago. From the link originally provided by brickbacon
So, corporate knew of the potential danger to their staff and that their countermeasures were not working. They knew this at least four, perhaps as many as sixteen months before this particular incident occurred(in April 04).
That’s what I wanted to know, too. According to Wikipedia, the manager’s boyfriend forced her to perform oral sex on him. I can actually wrap my head around a scared (probably kinda dumb) teenage girl being terrifed, intimidated, and awed by authority figures into submitting to this. I can even see how a McDonald’s manager would be dumb enough to do a strip search because a guy on the phone told her to. What I absolutely refuse to believe, however, is that this guy thought he was taking a blowjob for the sake of law & order.
This site has a far more detailed account of what happened, and includes details that didn’t appear in the other article, including that she was initially locked in the office, and that her clothes and car keys were taken away from her.
ETA: Oops, sorry. Didn’t realise the link had already been posted.
Huh? You linked to something about the current topic, not the coffee incident you challenged me on. Why did you bring up the coffee case in the first place?
I can’t imagine any scenario where an adult forces a teen to strip naked because some voice on the phone says they are a cop. Either you’re an incredibly irresponsible idiot who should never be manager, you’re in on it somehow, or you’re a pervert. If a voice on the phone tells me to even question an employee suspected of theft under any scenario I’d say no. If an employee is suspected of theft or doing drugs or whatever you try to catch them in the act and fire them. Under no circumstances would any manager ever think it was acceptable to strip search an employee. The manager is guilty guilty guilty and she and her perv boyfriend should be personally sued as well.
And yet, I still insist that for this hoax to work, it depends upon a failure in the stewardship that human beings are supposed to show each other. It depended upon a person being so incredibly stupid that they would willingly commit or assist in committing a sexual crime on a young girl on incredibly flimsy urging. It reminds me of that psychology experiment, I forget the name, where people could be urged into shocking the hell out of other unknown people simply by an authority figure telling them to do so.
Would anyone here have done exactly what the manager did? Explain why you would have done that.
This case is akin to someone dialing every home in a city and saying “this is Jesus. I want you to go next door and beat the hell out of your neighbor, because they’re Muslims.” You dial enough people, and some will do it, fully convinced that Jesus wanted them to be their hit man, in full denial of any factual evidence or rational thinking whatsoever. So if it happens, should we have nightly news bulletins telling us “remember kids, if someone calls you on the phone and says he’s Jesus and wants you to beat up someone, don’t do it?” What about the next case, where Jesus wants you to stand around naked at the airport. Or rob a bank. Or eat a banana slug. If you search Snopes right now, you can find innumerable hoaxes going around where someone fell for it. Nigerian scammers, anyone? I work in a professional environment in an office, where scads of scam e-mails are received as junk. If one of my co-workers is so stupid as to fall for a Nigerian scammer, should my company pay out big because we didn’t open every day with a Safety Tip on how Nigerian scammers work? What about the 50 other scam e-mails that arrived that day? There are some who receive more than 100 phishing attempts, scams, and hoax mails before lunch. How much of our daily billable hours do we spend in effect trying to teach people basic survival skills of life in this wacky modern world we live in?
I can understand why people think that McDonald’s “must pay”. It stems from the belief that any, or most failures of management which cause harm must be something that the company could have prevented via training or information exchange. As well as the belief that because the hoax had worked at other McDonald’s, that it was likely to keep working. I can understand that, really. McDonald’s should have got the word out better, but, and this is a big “but”, even if they failed in this instance, because of the egregiousness of falling for this scam - that is, what it took to fall for it - I do not feel they should have been legally liable.
What I don’t understand is why it is so difficult for some people here to understand the other opinion, which is that no sane, intelligent, or rational person should have been expected to fall for this, and McDonald’s can only communicate so much before it would be lost in the noise. Sometimes it doesn’t come down to anything a company can do, and sometimes it comes down to the fact that human beings do incredibly stupid or criminal things on their own.
I’m still waiting for someone to break their uncomfortable silence and defend the set-for-life award to the criminal scum who helped commit the sexual assault. How about it? How is she the “victim”, for committing a crime which involved her giving up the most basic level of stewardship someone should show towards a young girl like the (real) victim?
I don’t know how I can explain my position any better, and I think I will stop trying now. I didn’t think it was that unreasonable or kooky a stance; perhaps I should review it and see if I really am thinking in the right here. But it is another day of unpaid overtime work for me, so I’m not going to think about it too much.
Sweet merciful Jesus. Our legal system is more fucked than I thought. :rolleyes:
This is what you get when a verdict relies on a jury composed of Kentucky rednecks & hillbillies who married their cousins. We need professional jurors, and we need them NOW!
I think you have a perfectly valid point and I agree to some extent. When you look at our society you see lots of cases where people are warned against their own stupidity. Look at warning labels on everything. I remember unboxing a computer and their were warning labels on the plastic bags that suggested you shouldn’t put the plastic bag over your head or give it to infants to play with.
How far are we as a society supposed to go to protect the stupid from themselves. Look at the case where fast food places were being sued because this kid was dangerously obese. The lawyer was trying to suggest they were at fault for serving fattening food. I’d love to see warning labels on fast food bags.
Warning, our food taste good but is incredibly unhealthy with almost no nutritional value. {Salads excluded}
But I digress.
Look at how many people were duped before this incident happened. I have to wonder if they were sincerely tricked or just somehow perversely attracted to the whole thing. Regardless, I think the case being made is that since similar incidents had happened and cooperate HQ knew it they can no longer claim they never imagined it could happen. Once it has happened repeatedly they do have some obligation to alert their employees and adequately warn them and instruct them.
If FF joints were being robbed repeatedly and that posed a threat to employees would HQ have some obligation to warn employees on what to watch out for? I think so. A casual memo might be to little. I remember going through avoiding sexual harassment training and having to sign off that I had received the training. It’s expensive for companies to do that sort of thing but less expensive than a series of lawsuits.
It’s also a matter of what percentage responsibility is applied to those involved. She sued for what $200 million and got 6. Perhaps the 6 million is a percentage of a larger number.
Like you, I can’t imagine why the Summers got any kind of award at all. Any rational human being should know that you don’t strip search a teenage girl under orders from a voice on the phone. It’s fucking ludicrous.
If that were the case, the Milgram experiments would never have turned out the way they did. Sane, intelligent, rational people do fall for this sort of thing with dismaying regularity. Indeed they should not, but they do.
I wouldn’t have thought so either, and yet, here we are. As ridiculous as we all think it sounds from afar, I guarantee that there are plenty of posters on the SDMB who could be convinced to detain the girl and search her. I wouldn’t be shocked if there were a couple who could even be tricked into doing a strip search (though I will assume that there are no proxy rapists here). And these same people would also, of course, write about how ridiculous and awful it all is if they just read about it instead of lived through it. In other words, you never know.
Just in case it isn’t clear, I’m emphatically not saying that the behavior here was excusable in any way, and of course these people should be punished. I’m just saying I can understand how someone could make such an awful mistake and still be acting in good faith.
Except for the oral sex; that wasn’t so much in good faith, I bet.
My guess is the manager saw the blowjob as a perv’s golden ticket if you will “I get to legally do this underage teen that I’ve been wanting head from anyway”.
Does anyone know how this request was relayed by the cop, seriously?
It was indeed, however there was a slow build-up to it. I’ve attempted to put myself in the creep’s place to maybe understand this. Imagine you’re a 50 year old balding loser with a sloppy figure, engaged to an overweight, ugly McDonalds manager. You find yourself drawn into a situation where everyone around you feels that everything is on the level, so you assume the same attitude. You’re staring at an attractive 18 year old girl wearing an apron. Strange, perhaps? But no, nobody else thinks this is strange. The cop is on the phone, he’s been in touch with McDonalds’ corporate offices and the local head manager, according to your fiance. If this wasn’t legit, someone would have figured it out by now. So this must be ok, and this must be a real cop, and you now have a job to play in this very serious situation. The cop tells you to make her drop the apron and describe what she looks like. It seems reasonable, given the cop’s absence, that he would need some eyes and ears on the scene. However, now the hormones start going. The cop makes her jump up and down, do jumping jacks, and other strange things to try and “shake things loose.” While strange, it’s really not any more abusive than just standing there naked, so it slips by your moral filter. However, the hormones really start flowing. The cop tells you that you can save a lot of time and taxpayer dollars if you help break her down so she confesses. She’s a drug dealer, after all, and her tears are just an elaborate act. The cop suggests that you call her out on her fakery by humiliating her. The cop assures you that this is really quite normal, as unconventional as it might seem, and it’s your duty as a good American to help get a drug dealer off the streets. So you bend her over your leg and spank her. Again and again and again, trying to work out that confession. Now your hormones are raging like no other, uncontrollable in the face of your sad sex life and the hot piece in front of you, a hot piece of drug dealing, stealing criminal who needs to be punished.
10 minutes after he left the restaurant, he reportedly called a friend and said that he had done a very bad thing. Sounds like a man gripped by hormones which, once they had subsided, began to see things clearly again.
Anyway, god help me if I’m ever a 50 year old, balding, sloppy physiqued loser engaged to a McDonalds manager, because that would be some pretty unbearable temptation right there. Of course, it’s temptation that most people could resist, but that’s what makes this case so fascinating… it was the right people in the wrong place at the wrong time to make something truly bizarre happen.
Not that I’m defending him in any way, I was just trying to figure out what would make someone do that.
