An Indiana jury on Thursday ordered Netflix to pay $385,000 to a lady who was outed as a baby of infamous fertility physician Donald Cline in a documentary concerning the case.
The girl, Lori Kennard, was one in all three “secret youngsters” who sued the streaming service in 2022 after their names have been displayed on display screen in “Our Father.” The movie explored how Cline secretly fathered 94 youngsters, which got here to mild a long time later when a few of them despatched DNA samples to 23andMe.
After a four-day trial in federal court docket in Indianapolis, the jury dominated in favor of Kennard on Thursday night. The eight-member jury refused to grant any damages to a different plaintiff, Sarah Bowling. The claims of the third lady have been dismissed earlier than trial.
The ladies sued for “public disclosure of personal information,” alleging that they suffered emotional misery and have been terrified of social penalties as a result of their paternity being revealed.
“It is a precedential end result,” stated Robert MacGill, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, on Friday. “The jury verdict confirms how People are protected in opposition to invasions of privateness by filmmakers.”
Netflix has argued that the ladies’s names appeared solely fleetingly, and that they’d given up their declare to privateness by becoming a member of a closed Fb group for Cline’s secret youngsters and by posting concerning the case on social media.
The jury’s verdict signifies that it discovered that Kennard had saved her connection a secret, however that Bowling had not.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys argued that the producers understood the sensitivity of the case, and had promised to not disclose anybody’s identities with out their permission. The lawsuit accused Netflix and RealHouse — the documentary arm of Blumhouse Productions, which produced the movie — of recklessness and negligence in failing to blur out the ladies’s names.
In a ruling in October, Decide Tanya Walton Pratt allowed Kennard and Bowling to proceed to trial and pursue punitive damages. However after listening to testimony this week, the choose determined that RealHouse and Netflix had taken affordable steps to vet the movie for authorized points, and that the failure to cover the ladies’s names was primarily an trustworthy mistake.
Due to this fact, Pratt dominated that the plaintiffs may get solely compensatory damages, and never punitive damages. That was a win for Netflix, which may have been on the hook for tens of millions of {dollars}. Netflix continues to face by the movie and believes that, with all issues thought-about, the decision was a positive end result.
Netflix had additionally argued that the documentary was protected by the First Modification, however the choose rejected that, ruling that the ladies’s names weren’t sufficiently newsworthy to beat their privateness pursuits. MacGill argued that the case establishes that different reality-based productions may additionally face legal responsibility for privateness violations.
