hree years ago, in a case that eventually drew national attention to Bullitt County, Ky., an 18-year-old high school senior making $6.35 an hour at McDonald's was subject to the cruelest of hoaxes -- accused by a caller of theft, then detained, stripped and sexually humiliated for hours in the restaurant office.
Two others, also duped by the hoax, were convicted of crimes, though a jury acquitted the man police charged with orchestrating the entire thing.
Now, a jury will decide what price -- if any -- the $59 billion McDonald's Corp. should pay for Louise Ogborn's degrading ordeal.
In a fiercely litigated lawsuit scheduled to go to trial tomorrow, Ogborn will ask a Bullitt Circuit Court jury to make the company pay her more than $200 million -- including $100 million in punitive damages -- for failing to warn her and other employees about a hoax caller who had already struck 32 other McDonald's stores and as many as 130 other fast-food restaurants and retail stores across the nation.
It is believed to be the first such suit to go to trial; the rest were settled.
McDonald's says it's not to blame and that the real culprits include the caller -- and Ogborn herself.
The trial is expected to take four weeks. Stacked one atop the other, the pleadings in the case -- 815 documents in 35 volumes -- would stand 10 feet tall, twice the height of Ogborn herself.
"It is an interesting collision of forces going to battle over a bizarre set of facts," said William McMurry, the Louisville lawyer who helped win a $25.7 million settlement in sex-abuse cases against the Archdiocese of Louisville.
"There is no middle ground," he said. "It will be either a zero verdict for the plaintiff or a gazillion dollars. I have never seen as sensational a case as this, with so much to lose on both sides."
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