Hot Coffee Case Racks up Pretrial Loses For CNN

CNN suffered a steady stream of losses during a pretrial hearing in Florida on Thursday as a defamation case brought by a U.S. Navy veteran prepares to go to trial, reports the website Law & Crime.

During the nearly three-hour proceeding, a key victory for plaintiff Zachary Young was presaged when the judge overseeing the matter brought up the infamous McDonald’s hot coffee case.

14th Judicial Circuit Court Judge William Henry said that understanding and mentions of the hot coffee case often neglected the very concrete reasons McDonald’s was “tagged” as a defendant — but used the 1990s callback to illustrate a broader point about legal references.

“They would always ask those questions during jury selection,” Henry went on — again miming an attorney of days gone by. “‘Do you have any opinions about lawsuits and litigation just because McDonald’s got tagged for $6 million because some lady spilled hot coffee in her lap in the drive-thru? How does that make you feel about jury verdicts?’ or things of that nature.”

The decades-old tort lawsuit — which is formally stylized as Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants — assumed a level of esteem and infamy far beyond the legal community. The Liebeck lawsuit was referenced during a dispute over whether Young would be able to admit a series of related statements Jake Tapper made about journalistic ethics in the context of another high-profile defamation case.

Tapper’s comments were in reference to a case in which Fox News paid out $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems in order to settle a defamation lawsuit over pro-Donald Trump conspiracy theories and lies the network allegedly peddled about the 2020 election.

In the present case, the defendant network aimed to keep Tapper’s comments entirely out of the trial, arguing they were prejudicial.

Young argued for, and won, a ruling allowing those comments, in slightly limited form, to reach the ears of eventual jurors.

In the full Tapper comments, made in 2024, CNN’s star anchor also mentions the headline-generating amount of money Fox agreed to pay in order to settle the potentially much-costlier Dominion lawsuit.

On Thursday, the court nixed that monetary reference but otherwise allowed Tapper’s comments to be introduced during trial.

In the present case, Young is suing CNN in Bay County, Florida, over a 2021 segment that aired on “The Lead with Jake Tapper.” Young claims the network falsely painted him as an “illegal profiteer” exploiting “desperate Afghans” with “exorbitant” extraction fees amid the fallout of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Young, a U.S. citizen who lives in Austria and is the president of Florida-based corporation Nemex Enterprises, sued CNN for defamation per se, defamation by implication, group libel and trade libel, claiming that his efforts to save lives in Afghanistan as a security consultant were distorted by “lies published for sensationalism.”