A Federal Judge in Connecticut has thrown out a class-action lawsuit against World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. (WWE) and imposed harsh sanctions on the attorney who filed the complaint.
The lawsuit was filed by Attorney Konstantine Kyros and it primarily alleged that WWE wrestlers sustained “permanent degenerative neurological conditions resulting from traumatic brain injuries sustained during their employment.”
The allegations stated that the WWE was liable for the harm suffered by its wrestlers because the company made “deceptive public statements” to its employees which “downplayed the known long-term health risks of concussions.”
The court dismissed the claims as baseless and then went further by writing a scathing decision criticizing Attorney Kyros and imposing penalties against him for his behavior.
According to the ruling “this case has been characterized by Attorney Kyros’ repeated failures to comply with the clear and unambiguous provisions of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.”
The judge criticized the attorney’s filings which were “exceedingly long and consisted of paragraphs asserting generalities, legal conclusions and facts unrelated to the plaintiffs’ claims.”
Just one of Mr. Kyros six filings “named 53 plaintiffs, was 213 pages long, featured 667 separate paragraphs, and was accompanied by twelve exhibits totaling 208 pages.”
The court specifically noted that Kyros “claimed that plaintiffs were deceased when they were not and referenced events that transpired in the lives of wrestlers who were not parties to the lawsuit.”
In addition, Attorney Kyros’ complaint “contained patently false and nonsensical allegations resulting from [his] decision to plagiarize extensive portions of the complaint filed in the National Football League (NFL) concussion litigation.”
Attorney Kyros’ decision to assert frivolous claims has required the Court to waste considerable judicial resources sifting through three unreasonably long complaints filed…with the vague hope that some claim, buried within a mountain of extraneous information might have merit.
The court ordered Mr. Kyros to pay the WWE’s legal fees and court costs.
According to the WWE’s attorney the expenses are “easily in the six figures.”
Law Office of Justin R. McCarthy 