Barely over a year ago, a friend of mine got in a car accident on a really bad intersection in Sacramento, which has since improved. (Funny what adding a traffic light does to a high-speed overpass that you want to cross from an offramp… My friend was technically at fault, but I drove through that intersection a few times and it was nerve-wracking.) My friend had some bruising, but healed quickly, and thankfully the person in the colliding vehicle came out unscathed. The insurance companies chucked their lawyers at each other, and cars were fixed or replaced, and insurance rates probably increased as well, but soon enough everyone got their lives back on track. Until now, a year later - my friend is getting sued.
I know what you’re thinking - why am I talking about this on my blog? Until the whole thing blows over, I won’t identify my friend, which shouldn’t be long anyhow. It won’t even go to court, but if it did, I’d pay real money to see them argue this one!

No injuries on the police report, no communication, and served just days before one year after the crash, this lawsuit already looked suspicious. The statute of limitations on injuries from automobile accidents is 2 years in California, either counted up from the crash, or from when the injury was discovered. So they still had a year to go on the statute, so its not like they submitted it days before the deadline. Still, why absolutely nothing until now? What do they want?
$15,000 for medical expenses already spent,

$20,000 for future medical expenses.

Okay, sounds like someone did get hurt anyway, these numbers are pretty believable if the accident caused a long-term problem. Oh wait, there’s more.

$5,000 for loss of income.

$10,000 for loss of future earning capacity.

Hmm, that makes sense. If you’re in and out of the hospital, you’ll probably miss a few days of work, and having an injury could have a detrimental effect on your ability to work. Mind you, they would have to demonstrate the records of the injury, loss of income, etc. And they’re up against the fact that no injuries were reported at all, and the person in the other vehicle went home that night. But so far, those numbers didn’t look too unbelievable by themselves.

But then we looked higher up on the page.

$100,000 for pain and suffering

$100,000 for emotional distress.

Whoa. Someone’s trying to make bank off of this. $200,000 in the hard-to-disprove category, filed a year after the accident. $255,000 is an expensive price tag, and they’re going after an individual person, too. Why didn’t they go after the insurance company instead?

Turns out they did. They tried to go after the insurance company with the same exact thing, and the insurance company rejected it. So instead of trying to bring them to court, they go after my friend directly. You know, pick on the person who doesn’t have a huge team of lawyers. Well, it’s handed off to the insurance company now and their huge team of lawyers will handle it. Already the lawsuit had ‘Frivolous’ all over it, and it only gets worse for them. But I left out the craziest thing about it, the reason why I would love to see it if it went to court. Hell, if I was a lawyer, I’d love to argue it in court. Why?
This lawsuit was actually two. Or one lawsuit for two separate people suing my friend. The man who was in the accident was suing for $255,000. His wife was suing for $50,000. What for? Loss of consortium. Accidents can have a negative effect on sex - imagine being paralyzed - so this is an actual, legal category. Also hard to disprove, I might add. Are we supposed to send a court reporter to see if their sex life is up to par? If slapping my friend with this frivolous lawsuit causes them to experience a loss in consortium, can they counter-sue? Hehe.

So let’s recap. No injuries reported, no contact for a year, and a huge “pain and suffering” lawsuit heaped onto my friend, after they already tried the same thing on the insurance company and failed. Finally, the wife has experienced a downturn in her sex life with her husband. Wait a second, let’s look at that again. The husband sues for pain and suffering alone, and the wife sues for loss of consortium. Looking at the husband’s half of the lawsuit, under “Loss of consortium,” we see $0.00.

Bwa ha ha ha ha!

Apparently, if this legal brief is factually accurate, the wife has taken a big hit in her sex life, enough to warrant $50,000 payment, but the husband has NOT. A lawyerly lapse has revealed that this frivolous lawsuit is entirely one-sided. Just to be sure, I looked this up to make sure that if your sexual relationship (or other things that fall under “consortium.” This one specifically mentions sex.) suffers, that BOTH people can sue, and that when both sue it makes the lawsuit more likely to be taken up by a law firm. So this suggests that one person in this relationship, i.e., the husband, is not experiencing a loss of consortium.
I’m having a “House” moment right now. I hate to tell you this, lady, but your husband is cheating on you. In one episode of House, a man showed up at the free clinic with skin turned bright orange from taking carotenoid supplements. He said his wife didn’t say anything about it, from which Dr. Gregory House, in his biting, critical manner, concluded that this human carrot was being cheated on. No one in a loving relationship can miss their spouse qualifying as a traffic cone.

One person suing for loss of consortium, the other not. Ergo, someone’s getting more sex than the other. I’d love to be the lawyer that argues this. You see, if you sue over a loss of sex, you make your sex life a subject of the court case. In traditional Dogbert-answers-my-mail style, I shall refer to the plaintiffs as Mr. and Mrs Crummy.
“Mrs Crummy, you are suing for a loss of consortium, would you say that since the accident, you have not enjoyed sexual relations with your husband as much?”

“Oh yes, we hardly have sex now, it’s really horrible. He says he’s always tired and has headaches, and it’s really been a drag on my life.”

“When did this begin, was it immediately after the accident?”

“Well, not really, we didn’t realize there was a problem until about three months after the accident, and I asked him what was going on.”

“I see. Did your husband ever complain about it?”

“No, he didn’t seem to notice, the accident probably affected his sex drive or something.”

“Were there any other changes that took place around that time, new friends, different habits?

“Well there’s Cynthia, she’s been a good friend since the accident, helped us pull through, and stays at our place during the day to take care of my husband when he’s feeling ill.”

“Has your husband said anything to you about why he has not also sued for loss of consortium?”

“Well, no, I thought he was going to sue for that as well, maybe he forgot?”

“Is there any relationship between the days that your husband doesn’t feel like having intimate relations with you and the days that Cynthia is taking care of him?”

“Well now that you mention it… *gasp!*

—

Okay, remind me not to write lawyerly fiction. But yeah it might go something like that. Amazing, though, going to the effort of filing a lawsuit that looks to be frivolous, and also has a huge gaping hole that would get picked at if it ever went to court? If you sue for loss of consortium, you have to open up your relationship to scrutiny. And I’d be damned if a good lawyer wouldn’t notice that the lawsuit suggests that someone’s not getting sex, and someone else is. A little water and a cold night would split this case wide open.

People have cheated on their spouses and blamed their illicit relationships on getting an injury that made them stay home and hook up with people online, and tried to sue the, say, health club where they cut their hand and got that injury. This could be the same sort of thing. Actually, maybe they are blatantly saying that the husband DID cheat on the wife, and are trying to blame it on the accident?

If they weren’t going after a friend of mine, this would be funnier. Nevertheless, it’s out of their hands, now, and the insurance company will handle it. If there’s any merit to this case, it come out of their pockets - that’s what insurance is for. But still, when this one is over, we’ll have a real good laugh, and another one goes down in the books for legal frivolity.

It’s a crazy world out there, sometimes it can be maddening. But we can still get a laugh out of it, and that’s what Monday Madness is all about! Thanks for reading.