WWJD Note on Collection Letter Prompts Class Action
Photos courtesy of Hiscrivener
and Getty Images
Mark and Sara Neill were deeply offended when a debt collector contacted them last fall over an unpaid $88 chiropractor’s bill.
But the affront had nothing to do with the debt or the collector’s tactics and everything to do with the debt collector’s letterhead.
In the upper-right-hand corner of the Bullseye Collection Agency’s stationery were the letters WWJD. The Neills, who are from Becker, Minn., said they found the initialism—commonly understood to mean “What would Jesus do?”—both abusive and threatening.
The Neills claimed to have felt so abused and threatened that they filed a class action suit against Bullseye, a small family-owned collection agency in Monticello, Minn., on behalf of themselves and everyone else in the state who had received such a letter from the collection agency during the previous year.
The suit, filed last October in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis, alleged that the only possible purpose for using the WWJD was to make recipients think there would be religious consequences for failing to pay an alleged debt. “This is equivalent to a shame tactic and is an attempt to guilt an alleged debtor to pay the debt by portraying the debtor as a sinner who is going to go to hell,” the Neills’ lawyer, Thomas J. Lyons Jr., said in papers filed in connection with the suit.
But in this court battle, the Neills also have found themselves accused of not playing by the Golden Rule.
Continue reading and comment on “Thou Shalt Not Sue” in this month’s ABA Journal online.
