A District Court judge in Michigan has gone to great lengths to determine that a plaintiff who filed a Fair Debt Collection Practices Act lawsuit does not have standing to sue after the defendant failed to remove a dispute flag from the plaintiff’s credit report, ruling that the anxiety, humiliation, embarrassment, and stressed the plaintiff allegedly suffered was more due to his “general financial woes” than anything related to what the defendant did or did not do.
A copy of the ruling in the case of Morgan v. LVNV Funding can be accessed by clicking here.
The plaintiff disputed a debt that was owned by the defendant. Subsequently, Credit Repair Lawyers of America, which was representing the plaintiff, sent a letter to the defendant saying that he no longer disputed the debt and sought to have the dispute notation removed from his credit report. When the dispute notification was not removed, the plaintiff filed suit, alleging the defendant violated Section 1692e(2)(A) of the FDCPA by falsely representing the character, amount, or legal status of the debt.
But did the plaintiff actually suffer a concrete injury? That was the question that Judge Laurie J. Michelson of the District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan sought to answer. She first noted she was skeptical of an answer given by the plaintiff during a deposition, where he was asked about his financial damages and cited his declaration, which said, “[a]s a result of Defendant’s failure to remove the dispute comment, I have suffered from anxiety, embarrassment, humiliation, and stress.”
Ruling that the statements made by the plaintiff were “nothing more than ‘bare’ assertions of emotional distress” Judge Michelson ruled that the anxiety and stress suffered by the plaintiff were not sufficient for him to have standing.
Finally, Judge Michelson noted that the plaintiff “has not shown that LVNV’s failure to remove the dispute remark from his account would have any effect on his ‘reputation.’ He has not explained what sort of ‘hatred, contempt, or ridicule’ he would face as a result of the erroneous dispute comment,” she wrote. “For example, Morgan has not shown that creditors or other individuals who would see the dispute remark would act any differently towards him because of it. And he also has not shown that the credit reporting agencies-who LVNV reports to-lowered his credit score, held him in lower ‘estimation,’ or penalized him in any way because they believed he still disputed the account when he actually did not. If anything, it seems like removing the dispute comment — and thereby implicitly acknowledging the unpaid debt — would cause reputational harm, rather than alleviate it.”
