'I'm going to sue!' The strangest lawsuits ever filed in the U.S.
When the instructions on a cup of Velveeta’s microwavable mac and cheese said the meal only takes three and a half minutes to prepare, one woman in Florida expected just that.
But when it took her slightly longer to prepare her meal, the woman claimed Velveeta was guilty of false advertising and decided to sue the manufacturer for $5 million.
This is just the latest out of a long list of ridiculous lawsuits that have been filed in the United States over the years; so bizarre that one would even believe aren’t real. These are some of them:
You can’t talk about ridiculous lawsuits without mentioning the most infamous one: the hot coffee lawsuit. In 1992, 79-year-old Stella Liebeck got McDonald’s coffee spilled all over her when she was trying to remove the lid.
She burnt herself and sued Mc Donald’s. Most people made the obvious argument that it’s expected for coffee to be hot. However, the case was a bit more complex than that…
Liebeck suffered third-degree burns that required skin grafts, and ended up suing McDonald’s after they refused to reimburse her $10,000 for medical bills. She sued the fast food chain for $2.9 million dollars but only got $640,000.
So, despite its notoriety, this case isn’t really that ridiculous, especially when compared to these other seriously wacky lawsuits:
In 1995, Robert Lee Brock, an inmate at the Indian Creek Correctional Center in Chesapeake, sued himself for getting inebriated and violating his civil rights.
“For violating my religious beliefs, I want to pay myself $5 million, but ask the state to pay it in my behalf since I can't work and am a ward of the state,'' Lee Brock wrote. Needless to say, the case was dismissed in court.
Roy Werbal spent much of his life thinking that Froot Loops contained real fruit. When he found out they didn’t, he filed a suit in 2009 against cereal-maker Kellogg.
Photo: Sascha Bosshard/Unsplash
"Had he known that Froot Loops contained no fruit, he would not have purchased it," stated his complaint. However, it was dismissed.
The Australian teen who posed with a tape measure and a Subway sandwich that appeared to fall a full inch shy of its 12-inch mark probably had no intention of starting a three-plus-year lawsuit, but that’s what happened.
Ten different people filed lawsuits and they were consolidated into one. The proceedings dragged on for years until early 2016, when Subway agreed to award $500, plus attorney fees, to each of the ten plaintiffs.
John Leonard tried to buy a fighter jet with Pepsi points. He collected 7 million points in 1999, and then asked for his prize: a Harrier fighter jet like the one in a Pepsi TV ad.
Pepsi refused, so he sued the company for breach of contract and fraud. The court dismissed the case arguing that no reasonable person could think the commercial actually offered the jet.
This lawsuit is further explored in the recent Netflix docuseries: ‘Pepsi, where’s my jet?’
Isn’t looking like Michael Jordan a good thing? Allen Heckard doesn’t seem to think so.
Photo: News4Jax.com
In 2009 he filed a lawsuit against the basketball star and Nike, saying that looking like Jordan caused him emotional suffering.
Heckard seeked $416 million from Jordan, and another $416 million from Nike for making Jordan a celebrity, but he eventually got tired and dropped the suit.
Like many other alcoholic beverages, Bud Light serves their advertisements with ice cold beer and sexy women. One man in Michigan claimed the product wasn’t as advertised.
In 1991, Richard Overton sued the Anheuser-Busch Corporation on grounds that the Bud Light he consumed did not carry him away to a paradise full of beautiful women, like in the advertisement.
Within his claims, Overton added his suffering of emotional distress, financial loss, and mental injury. He sued for $10,000 but was awarded $0. The case was dismissed by the courts.
Finally, another of the more infamous fast-food lawsuits and definitely the most gruesome one: the time a woman sued Wendy’s after finding a human fingertip in her bowl of chili.
In 2005, Ana Ayala said she found a fingertip in her food, took the story to the press and proceeded to file a lawsuit against the fast-food giant.
When authorities started investigating the source of the missing fingertip, Ayala dropped her suit. It soon became clear that she'd planted the finger herself.
It turned out that Ayala’s husband’s coworker had lost his fingertip in a work accident and had willingly given it to them in order to settle a debt.
Ayala and her husband ended up pleading guilty to conspiring to file a false claim and attempted grand theft. They both spent time in prison.