A man suing Walt Disney Parks and Resorts for the wrongful death of his wife is facing a new legal hurdle: Disney is trying to get the case thrown out of court and sent to arbitration because he signed up for Disney+ years ago.
Court documents show that the company is seeking to have the $50,000 lawsuit dismissed because the plaintiff, Jeffrey Piccolo, signed up for a one-month trial of the Disney+ streaming service in 2019, which requires trial users to arbitrate all disputes with the company. The company’s lawyers also argue that because Piccolo used the Walt Disney Parks website to purchase Epcot tickets, Disney is immune from a lawsuit brought by the estate of Piccolo’s late wife, Kanokporn Tangsuan, who died of a severe food allergy reaction.
In a legal filing responding to Disney’s allegations, Piccolo’s attorney Brian Denney called Disney’s argument “absurd” and said the idea that signing up for a free trial of Disney+ would deprive a customer of the right to a jury trial “with a subsidiary or affiliate of Disney is so outrageously unreasonable and unfair that it shocks the judicial conscience.”
Walt Disney Parks and Resort “explicitly seeks to prohibit its 150 million Disney+ subscribers from pursuing a wrongful death case against it before a jury, even though the facts of the case have nothing to do with Disney+,” Denney wrote in court documents in response.
Piccolo is seeking damages of more than $50,000 under Florida’s wrongful death law, as well as damages for mental pain and suffering, loss of companionship and protection, loss of income, and medical and funeral expenses.
Disney did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.
In October 2023, Kanokporn Tangsuan, her husband Jeffrey Piccolo, and Piccolo’s mother dined at Raglan Road Irish Pub in Disney Springs, part of the Walt Disney World resort in Florida. They chose to eat at the restaurant, the complaint states, because they believed there would be appropriate safeguards against serving dairy and nuts to Tangsuan because of her allergies.
The server assured the couple that some dishes could be prepared without allergens, which the two confirmed “on multiple occasions,” according to the complaint. She also ordered a vegan beignet, scallops, onion rings and a vegan shepherd’s pie.
Although some of the delivered food was not labeled “allergen-free,” the server again assured them that it was allergen-free, but after dinner, Tangsuan, 42, went shopping in the Disney Springs area and began “suffering a severe acute allergic reaction,” the lawsuit alleges.
Despite self-administering an Epi-Pen, Tangsuan died of “anaphylaxis due to high levels of dairy and nuts in her system,” the lawsuit said, attributing the information to a medical examiner’s investigation.
–CNN’s Ramishah Maruf and Maria Sole Campinoti contributed to this report.
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