Hot Coffee is a new HBO documentary about how corporations used a famous legal case to push for limits on their liability under the guise of “tort reform.” Although you think you know about the McDonald’s hot-coffee-spill case, you know less about what happened than you think.
In 1992, the 79-year-old Stella Liebeck went to McDonald’s with her grandson. After they made their purchase, the grandson pulled over the car to divide up the food and to allow Liebeck to add cream and sugar to her coffee. While removing the lid, Liebeck spilled the scalding coffee, which caused third degree burns and sent Liebeck to the hospital for eight days. After McDonald’s refused to help pay for medical expenses, Liebeck sued the company. The media reported about Liebeck winning more than two million dollars in punitive damages against McDonald’s, but that award was reduced to less than half a million dollars, and then the parties reached a settlement.
Hot Coffee tells a lot more about the case than you probably knew, because most of us know about the case from what we heard from corporations who used the case to get states to limit individual people from suing companies for damages. After you see the photo of the Liebeck’s third-degree burns and the know that hundreds of other people were burned by the coffee, you might be glad that she sued, leading McDonald’s to lower its coffee holding temperature. And, while you may still agree that limits on damages are a good thing, you will at least question the way corporate money influenced our perceptions of the issue and also bought politicians to support tort reform.
Overall, Hot Coffee is very informative and will open your eyes about an important issue. While it does take one side and you may disagree with some of its conclusions, its discussion of the legal cases will make you question some of your ideas. And that is always a good thing.
“Mad Movies” (or “Movies that Make Us Mad”) is a Chimesfreedom series about movies that expose information that we might not otherwise know about, revealing misinformation, lies, and hidden stories that make us angry.
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