Brianna Smith is a freelance writer and editor in Southwest Michigan. A graduate of Grand Valley State University, Brianna has a passion for politics, social issues, education, science, and more. When she’s not writing, she enjoys the simple life with her husband, daughter, and son.
In July 2016, actor Anton Yelchin was found pinned between “his Jeep and a brick pillar outside his house,” dead. Now, nearly two years later, that parents of the Star Trek star reached a settlement with Fiat Chrysler, the makers of the Jeep Grand Cherokee that “crushed their son in his driveway in a what’s been deemed a freak accident,” according to court documents.
The child welfare agency in Oregon recently agreed to pay a $1.3 million settlement, ending a lawsuit filed on “behalf of a girl who was allegedly sexually abused by her Gresham foster father in 2014.” This latest horrid incident of abuse began when the child was only four-years-old when state workers placed her with “Gabriel David Wallis and his wife” after the state determined she needed a safe and stable home instead of living with her mother and step-father. According to court documents, her mother and step-father “neglected her and exposed her to a high-risk environment involving drugs, prostitution and gang activity.” However, Wallis was “self-identified as a sex addict during the state’s screening and caseworkers either knew or should have known that he looked at child pornography online,” according to the lawsuit.
Did Uber discriminate against a woman with cerebral palsy in Texas? One lawsuit thinks so. According to a lawsuit filed earlier this week, D’Edra Steele was denied rides from a number of Uber drivers on “approximately 25 separate occasions” between 2016 and 2017. In the lawsuit, Steele claims that “drivers repeatedly canceled rides because she requires the use of a service dog” and as a result, she has accused “Uber of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Texas Human Resources Code.” She currently hopes to receive damages for “intentional infliction of emotional distress.”
A lawsuit involving Joanna Gaines’ furniture line recently reached a settlement, meaning the co-star of HGTV’s Fixer Upper “will not have to sit for a deposition.” What was the lawsuit about, though? Who filed the suit? According to court documents, the lawsuit was filed by “Standard Furniture Manufacturing against its Chinese suppliers LF Products for delivering chairs and sofas labeled ‘top grain leather’ and using water buffalo hide instead.”
The Board of Education at Avon High School recently agreed to settle a federal lawsuit filed against it almost four years ago that “claimed three teachers and a guidance counselor at the school had indoctrinated two former students into a religious cult.” The lawsuit itself was filed by a family whose children attended the school. According to the family’s lawsuit, “three teachers and a guidance counselor exerted an improper influence on their three daughters and alienated two of them from the rest of the family.”
Discrimination is never okay, especially when it’s directed towards someone who is or was recently pregnant. One woman in Tallahassee, Florida learned just how awful it feels to be discriminated against, and decided to file a lawsuit as a result. Kissi Moore, a former employee at Whole Foods, is an African-American woman who claims in her pregnancy and racial discrimination lawsuit against the supermarket chain that she was “treated unfairly after her pregnancy and because of her race.”
A new study published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology suggests that “patients with private health insurance often face high out-of-pocket fees for advanced imaging.” The findings of the study were discovered after researchers examined “government data on out-of-pocket cost for imaging and other essential health services for 18,429 plans available in the U.S. private insurance marketplace last year.” Why are patients with private insurance allegedly paying more, though? How much more are they paying than other patients?
After filing a lawsuit against Edina High School, the school district, principal, and superintendent over alleged discrimination, student members of the Young Conservatives Club (YCC) recently agreed to a settlement that will result in their club being reinstated at the school. In filing the lawsuit, the YCC students “charged the school with violating students’ rights of freedom of speech and of association, equal access, and not abiding by federal laws and codes for the U.S. Flag.” But what did the school do to prompt the lawsuit in the first place?
A copyright infringement lawsuit was recently settled between the artist who “created Pepe the Frog” and Missouri native Jessica Logsdon. The artist, Matt Furie, originally filed the lawsuit because he alleged that Logsdon misused the “character to sell hate-promoting oil paintings.” This isn’t the first lawsuit Furie has filed over his character, Pepe, though. On his “campaign to reclaim his creation from far-right extremists who hijacked Pepe, mixing images of Furie’s ‘chill frog-dude’ with Nazi symbols and other hateful imagery,” he also filed a lawsuit against Infowars, a “conspiracy-promoting website…for selling a poster that included an image of Pepe.”
Michigan resident David Green recently filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court “against the city of Mission and three of its police officers.” Why? Well, according to Green, the three police officers named in the lawsuit “fatally shot his mentally ill son” two years ago after allegedly failing “to use de-escalation tactics after he called police Feb. 22, 2016, seeking help for his 38-year-old son, David Green II.” The lawsuit also alleges that the officer’s “excessive force led to his son’s death.”