On Wednesday, the judge awarded $306,750 in compensatory and punitive damages plus attorneys fees to Jennifer and John Palmer, who wrote their review in 2009. KlearGear lost in a default judgement in federal court in Utah in May 2014.
The attorney representing the Palmers, Scott Michelman of the advocacy group Public Citizen, told Ars that collecting the money may not be so straightforward.
“We have been taking this case one step at a time,” he said.
“Now we’re going to be figuring out where KlearGear’s assets are and how we can collect them. The French company that appears now to own KlearGear made a series of statements to the media in which they attacked this lawsuit and me in particular, but they never made any kind of motion to the court, so there was nothing for the court to rule on as far as their objections were concerned.”
The company has not responded to Ars’ repeated attempts to contact it by phone and e-mail.
Previously, Ars received two unsolicited e-mails from Vic Mathieu, the director of corporate communications for Descoteaux Boutiques (DBS), KlearGear’s Paris-based parent company.
In the second e-mail, Mathieu claims that its one-time customer was “belligerent toward our customer care staff and threatened to defame KlearGear if he did not receive free merchandise and other consideration.”
“Such a customer behavior is rare, but it has become an increasing problem for many companies today,” he continued. “DBS' head of retail for North America, Lee Gersten, spends nearly half of every year in the United States and Canada and cites this problem as one of the reasons that we started to eliminate Kleargear.com's social media channels in 2012.”
All this over two desk toys
As Ars reported earlier, according to Jennifer Palmer, the original order consisted of “a perpetual-motion desk toy and a bendable smiley-face keychain” that were to be Christmas gifts to her from her husband John.After repeatedly attempting to contact the company by phone and e-mail, the couple reached a customer representative, who claimed that the items had never been paid for and had been cancelled.
By February 2009, Jennifer Palmer posted a review on RipoffReport.com lambasting the company and its poor customer service.
Over three years later, her husband John Palmer received an e-mail demanding that the review be deleted within 72 hours or that he pay $3,500, as he was in violation of the company’s “non-disparagement clause” of its terms of service. However, such a term did not appear in the Terms of Sale and Use that the Palmers had agreed to when they placed their order in 2008.
When the Palmers refused to pay or take down the review, KlearGear sent a collection agency to them for this money, which damaged their credit by August 2012.
By December 2013, the Palmers filed suit in federal court in Utah, asking the judge to issue a declaratory judgment in their favor, saying that the Palmers’ “debt” was “null and void.” The couple also wanted the judge to rule that John Palmer had not agreed to this “non-disparagement clause,” which is in violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution.
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