Jury orders Walmart to pay $34.7M in defamation case involving injured truck driver
- October 28, 2025
- Posted by: Web workers
- Category: Workers Comp
A jury in San Bernardino, California, on Tuesday ordered Walmart to pay $34.7 million to a truck driver after ruling that the retailer defamed the employee by claiming he committed “gross misconduct” and “integrity” violations over medical restrictions from a highway accident.
The jury with the Superior Court of California in and for the County of San Bernardino awarded Jesus Fonseca $9.7 million in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages, according to court documents.
Mr. Fonseca, a 14-year truck driver for Walmart who was injured after a vehicle rear-ended his semitruck on a highway in 2017, was given work restrictions that were “routinely modified” but “but for the most part they included no pushing, pulling and lifting over 5-10 pounds and no commercial driving,” according to his lawsuit filed in 2019 over alleged actions taken by Walmart supervisors.
As documented in the lawsuit, Mr. Fonseca alleges that Walmart failed to accommodate his restrictions and instead accused him publicly of fraud and eventually fired him for violating the company’s integrity rules in its code of ethics after discovering that he drove a recreational vehicle with his family.
Mr. Fonseca, claiming he “did not understand” that his work restrictions included “personal driving, especially because he drove to his doctor’s appointments and was not informed that he could not drive himself to his appointments.”
The jury found that Walmart failed to use reasonable care in statements it made about Mr. Fonseca and that such statements were made with malice, never establishing whether the statements were true. Such statements caused Mr. Fonseca actual harm and were intention, and that the ordeal caused him to suffer harm to his occupation.
Walmart said in a statement to several media outlets that it would “pursue all available remedies” because the “outrageous verdict simply does not reflect the straightforward and uncontested facts of this case.”
