MGM Sues The SURVIVORS Of Vegas Shooting

MGM Resorts has filed a lawsuit against the VICTIMS of last year’s mass shooting that took place during an outdoor concert. Ring of Fire’s Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins discuss this issue.

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Why does MGM think it's a good idea to sue the families of people who lost somebody, how is this a good idea? Give me your best spin on it, because I've been practicing law for 35 years and I can't find the spin that seems to work for MGM.

What's happening here is that you've got basically these scumbag lawyers for MGM, who say, "You are looking at a ton of liability here. You've got the issue of you gave this guy who did the shooting a free pass, you let him use your service elevators, you didn't question him. You let him stay locked in his room for a week without checking on him. So here's what we do, let's sue them first. Let's go ahead and make that happen, say that their claims are baseless and you, MGM, have no liability whatsoever."

Even though we know that this is a losing argument, what it's going to do is it's going to bleed these people dry, I hate to use that phrase here for mass shooting survivors, but that's what it is. They want to prolong the suffering, perhaps make some of them drop out of the other lawsuit because they can't afford to defend themselves against these massive suits coming from a giant like MGM that could afford to have lawyers all day long, every day.

Okay, so the predicate is that the people bringing the case, the lawyers bringing the case, are doing something wrong because they're bringing the case. That's where it starts, correct?

Yeah.

And then the clients are doing something wrong because they're allowing these lawyers to bring the case. This, to me, if I'm trying this case, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make this lawsuit part of the punitive damages. I'm going to say not only do we have a case where these companies were responsible for these deaths because of their negligence, because they clearly understood what was happening, failed to do what they should have done, protect the public. They were told that this was a problem ahead of time, they had plenty of notice of these kinds of problems.

So the mother of a child who's killed here brings the lawsuit, the case takes place, the trial takes place, and then comes something called punitive damages. Most of the time punitive damages is the second phase of a trial and when that punitive damage is decided, you're able to look at what's the conduct, the overall conduct, of the people I'm suing, MGM. What is their conduct?

Their conduct in this situation is so bad, not only have they been responsible for the death of these people, but now they're suing the people, trying to get their money back. I gotta tell you, there's no jury on earth that is not going to take this absurd step that's made by MGM and make them suffer in punitive damages. I mean, do you agree with that? Unless I'm missing something here.

No, no, no, 100%. Look, 58 people died, you had over 1,000 injured. I actually had a good friend of mine who was there, she was at this concert, she fled. She said you ran between the shots, when you stopped hearing the gunfire, you got up and ran. And as soon as you heard it again, you had to dive underneath or behind whatever it was. She wasn't hit, she was safe, she survived, she was okay, but she still will talk, from time to time, because there's a PTSD to it.

Yeah.

It comes back, you have these nightmares. That's not going to go away.

Yeah.

And now, the people who have filed this lawsuit are going to deal with not just the horrifying memories, not just the loss of the family, the loss of everybody else, or the fact that you got shot and you live now with a permanent disability or physical pain every second of your life, now they deal with this.