A jury has ordered Walmart to pay almost $35 million to one of its former truck drivers after it found that the retailer falsely accused him of worker’s compensation fraud and wrongfully terminated him.
Last week, the San Bernardino County jury ordered Walmart to pay driver Jesus “Jesse” Fonseca $25 million in punitive damages, plus another$9.7 million for future non-economic losses in the case, according to Fonseca’s attorneys who shared a statement with CBS MoneyWatch.
The jury found that Walmart had falsely accused him of violating its integrity policy in the company’s statement of ethics, Fonseca’s attorneys added.
Fonseca had worked at Walmart’s Apple Valley distribution center in San Bernardino County for 14 years. During a June 2017 shift, Fonseca was injured when another semi-truck slammed into his Walmart semi-truck from behind, his attorneys alleged in a 2019 lawsuit.
After being injured, he filed a workers’ compensation claim for his injuries and was instructed by doctors not to push, pull, or lift anything over 10 pounds. He was also told to stop driving a commercial vehicle.
The lawsuit alleges that despite the advice from medical professionals, Walmart failed to accommodate the work restrictions.
Eventually, Fonseca was placed on medical leave but then was terminated, allegedly because Walmart surveilled him and found him driving a personal vehicle, his lawsuit says.
The suit added that Fonseca was aware he could drive personal vehicles and that he was only restricted from driving commercially.
David M. deRubertis, one of Fonseca’s attorneys, shared that the evidence presented during the trial “showed that Walmart’s defamation of Jesse was part of a broader scheme to use false accusations to force injured truckers back to work prematurely or, if not, terminate them so that Walmart can cut down workers’ compensation costs.”