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Procter & Gamble is giving Amway distributors hell for trying to overturn a multimillion-dollar jury verdict against them for spreading the false rumor that the household-products giant supported a satanic church.
P&G has filed a brief opposing the distributors' request for an investigation into possible jury misconduct. The company argues there is no evidence of wrongdoing by the panel and that court rules prohibit questioning jurors about their deliberations.
"The spectacle of subjecting jurors in this case . . . to defense counsel's vintage rapid-fire interrogation, inevitably twisting them in testimonial knots as they struggle to recall what they said, did, thought, and agreed to during a five-hour period many weeks ago, holds the potential to be one of the true low points in the history of our jury system," says the brief, filed Thursday.
P&G was awarded $19.25 million in the case. The verdict was returned March 16 after a two-week trial in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City and five hours of deliberation.
The Amway defendants filed a motion last month alleging that jurors reached the figure by using information not introduced at the trial - basing the amount on their own estimates of how much P&G spent on attorney fees.
They asked Judge Ted Stewart to look into the matter.
The judgment came after a dozen years of litigation. P&G filed suit in 1995 against Randy Haugen, a high-ranking Amway dealer, and three other distributors over their dissemination of the devil-worship hoax.
The four passed along the false story that P&G's president had appeared on a TV talk show and announced his company's affiliation with the Church of Satan.
The Cincinnati-based P&G claims the Amway defendants cost it millions of dollars in sales. The defendants say they merely repeated a rumor they believed at the time to be true.
Amway Corp. earlier was dismissed as a defendant. The four defendants technically are not employees of Amway but are independent business owners.
According to the Amway motion, P&G could not prove at trial a single lost sale due to the lie, so the jurors arrived at the damage award by calculating the amount of the plaintiff's legal fees. Each of the 11 jurors - a 12th was excused because of illness - set an amount and then the panel added them up and divided by 11, the motion says.
The jury's decision was not unanimous, as required by law, and the award was based on an impermissible "quotient verdict," the defense argues. It submitted affidavits from three jurors to back up the claim.
P&G lawyers responded that every juror, at the end of the deliberation, agreed $19.25 million was a fair amount in damages.
Still pending before Stewart is a P&G request to triple the award to $57.75 million, as allowed by law.