AUSTIN - It's taken more than six years for a woman who was allegedly sexually assaulted at a Houston hotel to figure out where her case will be heard.
The Texas Supreme Court on Dec. 31 granted Facebook's request that the lawsuit filed by a Jane Doe against it be heard in Harris County District Court, stepping into the issue of certain coordinated litigation for the first time.
In Texas, a multidistrict litigation proceeding exists to handle sex-trafficking claims against various hotels and social media companies. But none of them involve the Houston hotel America's Inn, owned by Texas Pearl, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook.
The Texas Supreme Court found this was reason to keep Jane Doe's case out of the MDL, sending it back to the Houston state court in which it was first filed - in October 2018.
"At a general level, the (MDL) cases involve criminal exploitation of minors that took place at Texas hotels through the use of social media," Justice Jane Bland wrote.
"There, however, the commonality ends. The suits name different criminal perpetrators. The MDL does not involve an affiliated hotel. It does not involve similar incidents of trafficking, premises, time periods, or fact witnesses."
The Texas Legislature granted state courts the ability to create MDLs 20 years ago. MDLs are used, in particular in the federal court system, to coordinate pretrial proceedings when enough lawsuits involve similar questions.
The largest federal MDL houses lawsuits claiming military servicemembers sustained hearing damage from defective ear plugs made by 3M. While it's certainly easy for defendants to have to litigate in one court, filings that won't be scrutinized individually can be thrown in and eventually earn their share of proceeds from mass settlements.
At the end of 2022, Lawyers for Civil Justice revealed that 73% of all cases in federal courts are in MDLs.
“MDLs have become warehouses for unexamined claims – where even bare bones proof of exposure and injury are not required nor provided – which hampers the ability of judges to manage the proceedings," LCJ general counsel Alex Dahl said then.
"Indeed, in many MDLs, cases are dismissed from bellwether trial pools and at the remand stage when it is discovered that they don’t belong in the MDL, which wastes time and delays these proceedings; still others drop out of settlements because they don’t meet the most basic requirements."
Meta fought Texas Pearl's move to have the case sent to Texas' sex-trafficking MDL. In its appellate brief to the state Supreme Court, Meta urged the court use its power to review MDL transfers.
"(T)he Court has never exercised that jurisdiction," it wrote. "In the last six years, it has become the MDL panel's practice to rule on MDL transfers without substantive analysis or reasoned opinion."
Legislation creating the Texas MDL system provided the Supreme Court the power to provide appellate review for all MDL panel orders, which the court did. But it had never approved or modified transfer standards created by the MDL panel in 48 MDL panel decisions between 2003 and 2016.
Meta said Jane Doe's case, despite involving common issues and attorneys in other MDL cases, should be heard on its own in Harris County. The MDL was created in 2019 when Salesforce requested five cases be consolidated.
"What is more, the transfer will not increase convenience and efficiency, as also required by the statute, because the MDL process can do little to streamline discovery when cases have no common fact issues," Meta's lawyers wrote.
Backpage.com was a frequently named defendant in sex-trafficking cases and Jane Doe's original complaint listed it, but the company was voluntarily non-suited in 2019.
Jane Doe's lawsuit seeks to blame Facebook for what happened to her at America's Inn. She was 15 years old in 2012 when she was friended by another Facebook user who told her she was "pretty enough to be a model," the suit says.
She met the friend to supposedly further a modeling career.
"Within hours of meeting the Facebook Friend, photos were taken of Jane Doe and were posted on Backpage, and then she was raped, beaten, and forced into further sex trafficking," the lawsuit says.
"Jane Doe had never been made aware of the dangers of sex traffickers on Facebook."