LOS ANGELES (Legal Newsline) - A woman who claimed she was left with “foreign accent syndrome” after a Hilton shuttle bus hit her can’t rescind an $85,000 settlement because her lawyer supposedly coerced her into accepting the deal, a California appeals court ruled.
Noting plaintiff Laura Fettig’s lawsuit had “serious problems,” California’s Second District Court of Appeals, in a May 4 decision, ruled that she had consented to a “generous” settlement in open court and couldn’t back out of it now.
Fettig claimed a Hilton bus hit her in 2014 and sued the company for a variety of injuries including a vaguely European accent she said she begun speaking after the accident even though she was born and raised in the U.S. Hilton denied her claims, saying she got angry after the driver cut her off and thumped her fist on the bus, faking her other injuries.
The case went to trial in 2020, with Fettig speaking in her foreign accent to the jury. After she rested her case Hilton offered her $85,000 to settle. She suddenly switched back to an American accent, and in a back-and-forth with the judge that fills 10 pages of court transcript, she finally agreed to accept the settlement. She refused the judge’s offer to think about it overnight.
Months later, Fettig hired new lawyers and asked the court to set aside the settlement, claiming her lawyer, Jared Gross, had bullied her into agreeing to the deal and threatened her with losing her house if she rejected it and lost at trial.
The trial court denied her motion and she appealed, but the appeals court wasn’t sympathetic. “Weaknesses plagued Fettig’s case,“ Justice John Wiley wrote in a brief opinion rejecting her motion. Her account of the accident was unclear, the judge wrote, and under cross-examination she admitted she’d lost little income because she was already on disability.
Basic contract law states that a contract can’t be voided for duress if the counterparty doesn’t know about it and in good faith provides value in the transaction, the court ruled.
“Fettig had no grounds for rescinding a contract with parties that had not known about the supposed duress by third person,” the court ruled. “Hilton materially relied on the settlement: midtrial, it surrendered the possibility of a defense verdict.”
“An $85,000 settlement is not an inequitable result under the facts and circumstances of this case,” the appeals court concluded.
Fettig was represented by Thomas F. Mortimer and James J. Orland; Hilton was represented by Harmeyer Law Group.