Disney’s legal team has suggested that the widower signed away his right to file a lawsuit both when he accepted the terms and conditions of a free Disney+ trial in 2019 and when he purchased Epcot Center tickets for his family in 2023.
Attorneys for Disney World have asked a court to dismiss a widower’s wrongful death lawsuit, arguing that the man waived his right sue when he signed up for a Disney+ trial.
According to the BBC, the wrongful death lawsuit was filed by Jeffrey Piccolo.
Piccolo’s wife died in 2023 from a severe allergic reaction caused by food she had purchased and consumed while visiting Disney World. However, Disney has since said that it cannot be held liable for the death of Dr. Kanokporn Tangsuan, who died hours after her meal.
In court, attorneys for the company stated that Disney cannot be held liable for Tangsuan’s death, as it neither owns nor operates the Irish pub-themed Raglan Road restaurant, which is located on the grounds of the Walt Disney World resort in Orlando, Florida.
“We are deeply saddened by the family’s loss and understand their grief,” Disney said in a statement. “Given that this restaurant is neither owned nor operated by Disney, we are merely defending ourselves against the plaintiff’s attorney’s attempt to include us in their lawsuit against the restaurant.”
But, perhaps more startlingly, Disney’s legal team has suggested that Piccolo signed away his right to file a lawsuit both when he accepted the terms and conditions of a free Disney+ trial in 2019 and when he purchased Epcot Center tickets for his family in 2023.
CNN reports that Piccolo’s own lawyers have since called Disney’s arguments “preposterous,” saying that Disney is “explicitly seeking to bar its 150 million Disney+ subscribers from ever prosecuting a wrongful death case against it in front of a jury even if the case facts have nothing to do with Disney+.”
Piccolo, the widower’s legal team emphasized, said that he only signed up for a month-long trial—and canceled his subscription before he was ever charged for service.
David Horton, a professor at the University of California-Davis School of Law, told CNN that courts “intuitively” recognize the inanity of arguments that try to expand service-specific arbitration clauses to unrelated claims.
“It’s absurd to say that you’re bound by an arbitration clause in a contract even if the subject of the contract has nothing to do” with a lawsuit, Horton said.
But Horton told CNN that Supreme Court precedent makes speculation difficult: in the past, the justices have said that federal arbitration law requires that arbitration agreements be enforced “according to their terms.”
“Some courts say that precedent applies to these infinite arbitration clauses, regardless of whether your claim has a link,” he said.
Jamie Cartwright, a partner at Charles Russell Speechlys, told the BBC that Disney’s push to move Piccolo’s claim out of court and into arbitration makes sense.
“Disney understandably may want to benefit from the privacy and confidentiality that arbitration brings, rather than having a wrongful death suit heard in public with the associated publicity,” Cartwright said.
Arbitration, a form of alternative dispute resolution guided by third-party arbitrators rather than a court, also typically costs less than protracted litigation—but has long been criticized as unfair to individual claimants, who may have little say in a company’s choice of arbitrator and often have no means to appeal an unfavorable decision.
Sources
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