The Disney company has had a change of heart about a lawsuit after intense public backlash against the company’s earlier response to a man who blames the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida for feeding his wife a meal that killed her due to an allergic reaction.
Jeffrey Piccolo is suing the entertainment company over the death of his wife, Kanokporn Tangsuan, who ate a meal at one of the restaurants in the Florida resort in October, 2023. Tangsuan had a severe allergy to dairy and nuts, which Piccolo said the couple had made very clear multiple times to the restaurant staff. But the meal they served her allegedly contained those ingredients, resulting in the woman’s death.
Piccolo filed a $500,000 wrongful death suit against Disney.
The company’s response only served to add insult to fatal injury. In an almost unbelievable move, the company tried to say that Piccolo had signed away his right to sue Disney because of the terms and conditions contained in the Disney+ cable television contract. It is unclear how a streaming TV service contract could be binding on the company’s actions operating a resort.
Disney had claimed that since the Disney+ contract that customers sign stipulates that all disputes must go into arbitration (not to court), that Piccolo was out of luck. In court filings, the house of mouse actually wrote that Piccolo had ignored the fact that he had previously signed a Disney+ contract for TV, prior to attending the resort, so the terms of the TV service contract meant he could not sue the company for any negligence at their real-word facility.
It gets “better.” Disney lawyers actually argued that Piccolo should have read the terms and conditions of his TV contract, even though the purchase of tickets to the resort was an entirely separate transaction.
Public outrage was swift and furious, and really quite predictable; it is surprising that Disney lawyers did not anticipate the PR black eye their heartless and legalistic maneuvering would provoke. Now the company says it will no longer try to block Piccolo’s suit.
But the company could not bring itself to totally let go of the oddball defense, telling media that it has decided to “waive our right to arbitration.” It seems likely that had that issue been litigated in court, Disney would have been informed that it did not have the right to impose TV contract terms on the customer transactions at its physical facilities.
