Stella Awards: Fake Lawsuit Myths And Utah Injury Victims (2026)

At a Glance (Utah Personal Injury Law): The “Stella Awards,” a viral list of outrageous lawsuits, mostly did not reflect verifiable cases. Many of the most-shared examples cannot be found in any court record and are now understood as fabricated or severely distorted, resulting in Stella Awards fake lawsuit myths The list fed into a broader “frivolous lawsuit” narrative that still affects how injured people think about bringing legitimate claims in Utah.

Key statutes: Utah Code § 78B-5-818 (Comparative Fault); Utah Code § 78B-8-201 (Punitive Damages).

Local Jurisdiction Examples: Utah Third District Court, Salt Lake County; Utah Fourth District Court, Utah County.

If you’ve ever described a lawsuit as something that “belongs on the Stella Awards list,” or if someone used that phrase to dismiss your situation, this post is for you. The Stella Awards were not a legal database. They were not a news report. They were a humor newsletter that, once stripped of its satirical framing and forwarded as “true stories,” helped cement one of the most persistent myths in American civil justice: that lawsuits are mostly frivolous and out of control.

Many of the most famous Stella Awards lawsuits were myths that never happened in any verifiable way.

This is the final post in our series on famous lawsuits that weren’t what you think. Read about Stella Liebeck, the real person this list was named after, here.

Who Is Actually Searching for This

People in Utah County and along the Wasatch Front search for “Stella Awards” when they’ve heard the phrase used to brush off their situation. When a family member cites a Stella Awards story as a reason not to pursue a legitimate injury claim. When they want to know whether those cases were real before they make a decision about their own case.

That answer matters in a very practical way. If the cultural “evidence” that lawsuits are out of control was largely fabricated or distorted, that changes how much weight you should give to social pressure not to pursue a real claim.

What the Stella Awards Actually Were

Randy Cassingham is a humor writer and newsletter publisher. In 2002, he launched the “True Stella Awards” as a project highlighting lawsuits he viewed as excessive or absurd, named after Stella Liebeck, the plaintiff in the McDonald’s hot coffee case. Some early entries drew on real lawsuits, sometimes with reasonable summaries and sometimes with significant simplification or spin. Others were written for comic effect and framed as satire in his own material.

When the concept jumped from his controlled publication into forwarded emails, that framing disappeared. The viral versions circulated as a plain numbered list of “outrageous lawsuits,” with no byline, no disclaimer, and no “this is humor” signal. Recipients were invited to treat the entire list as factual, real-world cases.

Fact-checkers later examined these lists and found that many of the most-shared examples were either impossible to verify in any court record or clearly fictional. Snopes, among others, documented that widely forwarded Stella Awards emails included fabricated cases, distorted retellings, and lawsuits that bore little resemblance to any actual filing.

The Cases That Were Never Real (As Far As Anyone Can Tell)

Because court records are public, verifiable cases usually leave a trail: case numbers, parties, jurisdictions, judges, and reported decisions. Many of the splashiest Stella Awards stories do not.

The woman who sued herself after crashing a stolen car
The most-shared version goes like this: A woman stole a car, crashed it, and successfully sued the car’s owner for the injuries she suffered while driving the car she had stolen. When legal researchers and fact-checkers tried to verify this story, they could not find any matching case in any accessible court database. No jurisdiction. No docket. No parties. No decision. There is no verified record that this lawsuit was ever actually filed, much less that the plaintiff “won.”

The bank robber who slipped on a wet floor mid-robbery
Another staple email story: A bank robber slips on a freshly mopped floor during a robbery, sues the bank for premises liability, and receives a large payout. Again, legal databases and media archives contain no documented case that matches this description. No case number. No opinion. No settlement reported in reputable news sources. The best available evidence is that this is an invented story, not a real lawsuit result.

The woman awarded damages because her husband had an affair
Various versions described a wife suing her husband’s girlfriend for an “alienation of affection” claim and winning an absurd amount of money. Here, the problem is more subtle. Alienation of affection is a real legal tort in a small number of states, including North Carolina, Mississippi, and Hawaii. Real verdicts in alienation-of-affection cases exist, and they are not inherently frivolous. The Stella Awards–style versions typically implied that the legal theory itself was made up and that any award under it was obviously ridiculous. In reality, these claims are allowed only in a handful of jurisdictions, under specific rules, and often in emotionally and factually complex situations.

This is the more insidious category: a real legal concept, presented as if it were laughable by definition, in a way that trains people to dismiss legitimate legal theories as jokes.

The Cases That Were Real and Still Misrepresented

Some lawsuits used in the Stella Awards ecosystem began with real events and real plaintiffs, and then had their context removed until the case seemed absurd.

Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants
The entire Stella Awards concept leans on the McDonald’s hot coffee case as its founding example of “out-of-control” litigation. But as we covered in the second post in this series, Stella Liebeck suffered third-degree burns over a significant portion of her body, required skin grafts and extensive medical care, and McDonald’s had received hundreds of prior complaints about burns from excessively hot coffee. The company had internal knowledge of the risk and made an explicit decision not to change its coffee temperature policy.

The Stella Awards borrowed Liebeck’s name while stripping out the facts the jury actually heard. What remained in the public imagination was a cartoon version: “woman spills coffee on herself, wins millions.” That version was never honest.

Premises liability and slip-and-fall cases
Many Stella Awards entries portrayed slip-and-fall cases as inherently fraudulent or ridiculous. In reality, premises liability law exists because property owners and occupiers have a legal duty to maintain reasonably safe conditions for visitors. A slip and fall is not frivolous by definition. Whether a particular claim has merit depends on specific facts: What was the hazard? How long had it been there? Did the owner know or should they have known about it? What steps, if any, did they take to fix or warn about it?

Writing off all slip-and-fall cases as silly is like saying all car accident cases are silly. The category is not the issue. The facts are.

How These Stories Plugged into the Tort Reform Narrative

The Stella Awards emails did not emerge in a vacuum. By the 1990s and 2000s, there was a broad, well-funded national push for “tort reform” – a set of legal changes designed to make it harder or less profitable for injured people to pursue certain types of claims. Those changes included caps on punitive damages, caps on non-economic damages such as pain and suffering, shortened statutes of limitations, and procedural barriers that made large, complex cases (like class actions) more difficult.

Corporate and industry groups with significant exposure to personal injury litigation – including insurance companies, automakers, pharmaceutical companies, and others – were among the most visible advocates of tort reform. They frequently used anecdotes about supposed “ridiculous lawsuits” to build public support for legal changes that reduced their potential liability.

While there is no clear documentary record showing that the Stella Awards emails were created by these groups, the stories fit neatly into the same narrative. They provided memorable, emotionally charged “evidence” that lawsuits were out of control, even when those stories could not be verified in any court record.

That broader narrative has had real legal effects. Utah’s comparative fault framework, its serious-injury threshold in auto cases, and its punitive damages rules all reflect the national environment in which legislatures were encouraged to “rein in” civil lawsuits. Some of those provisions are reasonable and balanced. Others mean that injured people in Utah today may recover less than they would have under an older legal framework.

The cultural piece – the jokes, the forwarded emails, the “don’t be one of those people” comments at dinner – is what makes that legal framework self-enforcing. If injured people feel embarrassed or ashamed at the idea of bringing a claim, many cases will never even be evaluated on the facts. The deterrent effect kicks in long before any statute ever gets applied.

Why This Hits Harder in Utah Than in Many Places

Utah’s culture emphasizes community, harmony, and resolving conflict informally whenever possible. Many Utahns have been taught, explicitly or implicitly, that “causing contention” is something to avoid. For an injured person in Pleasant Grove or Lehi, that means the question of whether to pursue an injury claim is almost never just a legal question. It is a social and moral one.

If a neighbor, church leader, or family member describes suing as contentious, un-Christian, or greedy, that pressure can feel overwhelming. When the Stella Awards and similar stories are sitting in the back of people’s minds as “proof” that lawsuits are mostly ridiculous, that social pressure feels legitimate and justified.

But those stories are often built on cases that either never happened or bear little resemblance to the real facts. They were promoted in a broader environment where large repeat defendants benefited financially from fewer claims being brought.

Once you know that, the weight you give to that social pressure changes. You are not obligated to let an anonymous chain email, or someone’s half-remembered version of it, make your decision for you.

What Utah’s Actual Legal Landscape Looks Like

Here is a snapshot of key Utah personal injury rules that matter far more than any viral email:

Utah legal factor	What it means for injured Utahns
Comparative fault (§ 78B-5-818)	Fault is apportioned among parties. You can recover if you are 50% or less at fault; you recover nothing at 51% or more.
Punitive damages (§ 78B-8-201)	Available only for willful or reckless conduct, and subject to constitutional and statutory proportionality limits.
Auto serious injury threshold	You generally need at least $3,000 in medical expenses or meet other defined criteria to pursue pain-and-suffering claims outside no-fault in auto cases.
Statute of limitations	Commonly four years for most personal injury claims, and two years for wrongful death, with shorter deadlines and notice requirements for claims against government entities.
No cap on economic damages	Utah does not cap compensation for actual economic losses, including medical bills and lost wages, in most personal injury cases.

None of this is funny. None of it is extreme. It is just the real framework within which your potential claim would be evaluated.

What Most People Miss: How Cassingham Later Described the Viral List

Over time, Randy Cassingham publicly addressed the difference between his original “True Stella Awards” material and the chain emails being forwarded in his name. He has explained that he did not write many of the viral examples, that fabricated cases were added by others, and that real cases were stripped of key facts. He has also clarified that he never intended his work to be taken as a straight news digest of the civil justice system.

He is not responsible for what anonymous email forwards turned his idea into. But the trajectory of the Stella Awards—from satirical or opinionated commentary, to stripped-of-context email lists, to “common knowledge” about how lawsuits allegedly work—is a textbook example of how legal misinformation spreads.

The people who most need accurate information about the legal system are the people who have just been hurt and are trying to decide what to do next. They deserve better than to make that decision based on edited or invented stories that were never subjected to any real scrutiny.

The story you were told about the legal system was not the whole story.

Moxie Law was built for the Utahns who were injured, told their case wasn’t worth pursuing, and needed someone to evaluate it honestly. We have recovered significant compensation for clients who were right to come forward, even when people around them told them not to.

Strong Woman. Stronger Results. Schedule your free consultation. No fee unless we win.

Verified Utah Legal Resources (Current as of 2026)

• Snopes – “The ‘Stella Awards’ Lawsuit List.” 
• Utah Code § 78B-5-818 – Comparative negligence and fault allocation. 
• Utah Code § 78B-8-201 – Punitive damages. 
• Utah Code § 31A-22-309 – Personal injury protection (PIP) and auto threshold.