Louise Ogborn: The Scam, Criminal Trial, and Civil Verdict

The Louise Ogborn McDonald’s strip search case involved an 18-year-old employee who, on April 9, 2004, was held in the back office of a Mount Washington, Kentucky McDonald’s for three and a half hours, strip-searched, and sexually assaulted by coworkers acting on the instructions of a man on the phone pretending to be a police officer. The man tried in connection with the call was acquitted. Ogborn later won a $6.1 million civil verdict against McDonald’s, which the Kentucky Court of Appeals affirmed in full.

What Happened That Night

On a busy Friday evening, a caller identifying himself as a police officer reached the Mount Washington McDonald’s and asked to speak with a manager. Assistant manager Donna Summers took the call. The caller said he had a McDonald’s corporate representative on another line and that a young female employee matching Ogborn’s description was suspected of stealing a customer’s purse. He told Summers to bring Ogborn to the back office.¹

Believing she was cooperating with law enforcement, Summers followed the caller’s escalating demands. Ogborn had to surrender her cell phone and car keys. Then she was told to remove her clothing, including her underwear, and was left covered only by a small apron. The caller’s instructions grew more degrading over the course of the evening.²

At one point, Summers brought in cook Jason Bradley to watch Ogborn, and Bradley refused to comply. Maintenance worker Tom Simms was also brought into the room; the caller told him to have Ogborn remove her apron and describe her body. Summers eventually called in her fiancé, Walter Nix Jr., a 43-year-old exterminator, to sit with Ogborn while she returned to the restaurant floor.³

Left alone with Ogborn, Nix followed the caller’s instructions to force her to perform jumping jacks, struck her for not addressing him as “Sir,” and coerced her into performing a sexual act.³ The ordeal ended only when Tom Simms refused further demands, told Ogborn to keep her apron on, and told Summers the situation was wrong. Summers then realized she had been duped.²

Who Was On the Phone

Investigators traced a prepaid calling card used in the Mount Washington hoax to a Walmart in Panama City, Florida, where it had been purchased on April 9, 2004. Surveillance footage showed a white male in his thirties wearing a distinctive jacket. Local officers recognized the jacket as a uniform from Corrections Corporation of America, and the warden of Bay Correctional Facility identified the man as David R. Stewart, a 38-year-old guard.⁴

A search of Stewart’s home turned up a calling card that had been used to contact nine different restaurants, along with police-style uniforms, guns, holsters, and police magazines and job applications. According to investigators, when confronted he began to sweat and shake, and asked, “Was anybody hurt?” before saying, “Amen, it’s over.”⁴ Stewart was arrested on June 30, 2004, and extradited to Kentucky. The hoax calls stopped after his arrest.⁵

The Mount Washington incident was not isolated. By April 2004, managers had been duped at a minimum of 68 stores across 32 states, targeting a dozen different restaurant chains including Burger King, Wendy’s, Applebee’s, and Taco Bell. McDonald’s itself was aware of hoax calls at a minimum of 17 of its own stores by that point.⁴

The Criminal Cases

David Stewart Was Acquitted

Stewart was charged in Bullitt County, Kentucky, with impersonating a police officer, soliciting sodomy, soliciting sexual abuse, and unlawful imprisonment. He pleaded not guilty and went to trial in October 2006. The prosecution’s case was entirely circumstantial. There was no voice recording of the hoax call, no witness who could place Stewart at the pay phone, and the specific calling card used in the Mount Washington call was never recovered.⁵

After a week-long trial, the jury acquitted Stewart of all charges on October 31, 2006, after roughly an hour and 40 minutes of deliberation. He had faced up to 15 years in prison. Prosecutor Mike Mann said Stewart remained a suspect in similar cases across the country. No one else has ever been charged in connection with the decade-long series of hoax calls.⁵

Walter Nix Jr. Pleaded Guilty

Summers’ fiancé pleaded guilty in February 2006 to sexual abuse, sexual misconduct, and unlawful imprisonment in exchange for his testimony against Stewart. On March 15, 2006, Judge Thomas Waller sentenced him to five years in prison, with a requirement that he serve at least two.³

Donna Summers Took an Alford Plea

Summers entered an Alford plea, in which a defendant does not admit guilt but acknowledges the evidence could lead to conviction, to a misdemeanor charge of unlawful imprisonment. She was sentenced to probation. McDonald’s fired her after the incident.⁵

Ogborn’s Civil Suit Against McDonald’s

Ogborn sued McDonald’s for $200 million, arguing the company knew about the hoax calls and failed to protect its workers.

What McDonald’s Knew

Evidence at trial showed McDonald’s had received reports of similar incidents dating back to 1994.⁶ By April 2004, the company was already defending itself in at least four related lawsuits. Its own global security director, Michael Peaster, acknowledged in 2003 that “It appears the information is not reaching our restaurant staff.” About a week before the Mount Washington incident, a McDonald’s security executive sent a 10- to 15-second voice message to stores in the region about hoax calls, but depositions revealed it did not explicitly mention strip searches. The company had also planned to distribute warning stickers for store phone handsets but never followed through.⁴

Attorney Glenn Cohen, representing a co-defendant, argued during trial that McDonald’s had the infrastructure to warn managers, pointing out that the corporation managed to distribute information about McRib specials and counterfeit bill detection to its 800,000 employees. McDonald’s attorney countered that the company was “not the evil empire” and should not be held responsible for the decisions of individual employees, noting the training manual had prohibited strip searches since November 2001.⁷⁴

The $6.1 Million Verdict

In October 2007, a Bullitt County jury ruled in Ogborn’s favor on claims of sexual harassment, false imprisonment, negligence, premises liability, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The jury awarded her $1.1 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages.⁸

The Appeal

McDonald’s appealed. On November 20, 2009, the Kentucky Court of Appeals affirmed the full $6.1 million award and rejected each of the company’s arguments.⁹

On workers’ compensation, McDonald’s argued it was Ogborn’s exclusive remedy, but the court found the company had waived that defense by failing to prove it had secured coverage, and noted Ogborn had clocked out before any of the events occurred, meaning she was not acting in the course of employment.

On negligent supervision, the court held that McDonald’s had a duty to warn and train its staff because the company knew or had reason to know about the risk posed by the hoax caller.

On intervening cause, McDonald’s argued Nix’s criminal acts broke the chain of causation. The court disagreed, ruling that because McDonald’s was aware of previous similar incidents, the sexual assault was a “foreseeable danger” rather than an unforeseeable intervening event.

On punitive damages, the court upheld the $5 million award, finding the evidence supported that McDonald’s “should have anticipated the conduct in question” given the documented history of prior hoaxes.⁹

Summers Also Sued McDonald’s

Donna Summers filed her own $50 million suit against the company, alleging its negligence had led to her criminal conviction and emotional distress.¹⁰¹¹¹²

How So Many People Complied

Over 100 people fell victim to the hoax calls across the country. Researchers drew direct comparisons to the Milgram obedience experiments, in which ordinary volunteers administered what they believed were painful electric shocks to another person because an authority figure told them to. Jerry Burger, a psychologist at Santa Clara University who has studied the Milgram experiments extensively, said the strip search hoaxes showed how “ordinary people could be persuaded to do uncharacteristically terrible things under the orders of an authority figure.”¹³ Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, known for the Stanford Prison Experiment, featured the case through his nonprofit, the Heroic Imagination Project.¹⁴

At Stewart’s 2006 trial, Ogborn testified about the lasting impact of what happened to her: “I can’t trust anyone. I push people out of my life because I don’t want them to know what happened.”¹⁵

On Screen

ABC News covered the case on 20/20 and Primetime. In 2012, director Craig Zobel released the film Compliance, a dramatization of the Mount Washington incident that generated controversy and walkouts at film festivals for its unflinching depiction of the events. In 2022, Netflix released the docuseries Don’t Pick Up the Phone, which examined the broader pattern of hoax calls and the investigation that led to Stewart’s arrest.¹⁶

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