San Bernardino, Calif. (CN) — A California jury awarded $34.7 million in damages to a former Walmart truck driver, who claimed the company defamed him when it found he violated its integrity rules by driving a recreational vehicle while on medical leave and fired him.
The San Bernardino County Superior Court jury on Wednesday awarded Jesus “Jesse” Fonseca $25 million in punitive damages on top of the $9.7 million in compensatory damages they had awarded him Tuesday, according to a statement by his lawyers.
“We hope that this courageous jury’s message will make its way all the way to Bentonville so that Walmart will change this malicious policy of defaming injured workers like Jesse who did nothing wrong,” said David deRubertis, Fonseca’s lead trial attorney.
Fonseca had been working for the retailer for 14 years, and had even been the face of Walmart truckers in a national television commercial, when he was injured on the job in 2017. Fonseca, who was 54 at the time, was put on workers’ compensation leave, because his doctors said he shouldn’t drive a truck.
This restriction, his attorney told the jury, applied to driving an enormous, 18-wheeler truck for 10 to 14 hours a day, which was Fonseca’s job.
About a month and a half after the accident, while he was still on medial leave, Fonseca informed the nurse case manager, who coordinated his medical care with the outside company that handles Walmart’s workers’ compensation administration, that he was going on an RV camping trip with his family that August, as well as on a cruise with his wife for their wedding anniversary in September.
Walmart’s outside workers’ compensation administrator, however, decided to secretly investigate Fonseca to see if he was cheating and videotaped him driving the RV and also bending, which was another restricted activity per his doctors’ orders.
When this information was passed on to Walmart’s internal fraud investigator, Fonseca’s lawyers said he explained that he didn’t do anything wrong, that he was always honest and open with the company and that he had informed the workers’ compensation people that he was going on the pre-planned family trips.
Fonseca’s understanding, according to his lawyer, was that his work restrictions applied to work, not home. And Walmart’s fraud investigator found Fonseca to be credible and honest and declined to turn the driver over to the state for potential criminal prosecution.
Nevertheless, the company’s internal ethics department, without speaking to Fonseca or the company’s fraud investigator, concluded that Fonseca had acted with intentional dishonesty, which is an “integrity” violation under Walmart’s Statement of Ethics and a sufficient basis for the company to immediately fire him.
Fonseca sued the company in 2019.
Testimony at trial from Walmart witnesses confirmed that its ethics department treats findings of activity outside of restrictions as acts of “intentional dishonesty,” even if the investigation did not bear out that the injured worker was being intentionally dishonest, deceptive or fraudulent, Fonseca’s lawyers said.
“This outrageous verdict simply does not reflect the straightforward and uncontested facts of this case,” Walmart said in a statement. “Accordingly, we will pursue all available remedies.”
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