Disney Disputes Attempts to Add Additional Plaintiffs to Disability Lawsuit

Disney is protesting the attempt of the lawyers suing Disney to add additional plantiffs to the lawsuit claiming Disney’s new policies for guests with disabilities violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Disney’s first dispute with the motion is that it violates the rule that a complaint contain “a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.” Disney claims that, “Plaintiffs seek to amend their original 171-page complaint by adding 69 new plaintiffs, 154 causes of action, more than 1,400 paragraphs of “facts”, and 334 new pages. Altogether, the amended complaint would exceed 500 pages and 2,000 separate paragraphs. If the motion for leave to amend is granted, it would be one of the longest complaints ever filed in a federal district court. Most of the proposed complaint is repetitive, argumentative, inflammatory, irrelevant and unnecessary”

The second dispute Disney has with the claim was made in bad faith. Disney states that the complaint was timed to generate publicity: “It has been almost five months since plaintiffs initially filed their complaint on behalf of 26 individual plaintiffs. The initial complaint generated the publicity they claim led to the identification of additional plaintiffs. The very prolixity of plaintiffs’ proposed amendment, combined with the inflammatory tone of the allegations and the timing of its filing, demonstrate that it was made in bad faith. It is clear that plaintiffs’ lead counsel, who features articles about this case on his website, spent five months preparing a 334-page amendment primarily for the purpose of generating press for this case, instead of writing a short and concise statement of plaintiffs’ claims as required by the Federal Rules’ brevity mandate.”