Reported / Citable
Background
Jessica Rodriguez, a former human-resources specialist for Sabre Industries, alleges that Sabre executive Chris Brown sexually assaulted her after a work-related dinner in June 2022. Brown admitted taking a nude photograph of Rodriguez with his company phone and sending it to two people. Rodriguez also exchanged text messages with coworkers about workplace rumors concerning the incident and deleted some of those messages within the following two days because rereading them distressed her.
After Rodriguez sent Sabre a demand letter in January 2023, Sabre issued Brown a litigation hold directing him to preserve relevant electronic information. Rodriguez sued in July 2024. Soon afterward, Sabre fired Brown, collected his company phone, and factory-reset it through its ordinary offboarding process, destroying the photograph and associated communications and data. Both sides sought spoliation sanctions: Rodriguez over Brown’s phone, and defendants over Rodriguez’s deleted messages.
The Court’s Holding
Magistrate Judge Dena Hanovice Palermo recommended granting Rodriguez’s sanctions motion. Sabre had a preservation duty by February 2023 at the latest, when it issued the litigation hold, but failed to collect Brown’s relevant phone data and later wiped the device. The court found Sabre’s explanation that it mistakenly forgot the hold not credible, emphasized defendants’ shifting accounts of what happened to the phone, and concluded that defendants acted with intent to deprive Rodriguez of evidence.
The court recommended an adverse-inference instruction allowing the jury to presume that the photograph, text messages, and other Rodriguez-related data on Brown’s work phone were unfavorable to defendants. It declined to recommend the default judgment Rodriguez requested, concluding that the adverse inference would address the prejudice and provide appropriate deterrence.
The court also recommended denying defendants’ sanctions motion. Defendants did not show that Rodriguez knew or reasonably should have anticipated litigation when she deleted the June 2022 messages, months before she retained counsel or filed an EEOC charge. Her general human-resources experience did not establish that she anticipated litigation in this particular dispute.
Key Takeaways
- A litigation hold must be implemented in practice; issuing one does not excuse a company’s failure to collect and preserve relevant data from a custodian’s device.
- Wiping a device under a routine offboarding policy may support a finding of bad faith when the device is subject to a known preservation obligation and no credible explanation accounts for the failure.
- Spoliation sanctions require proof that a preservation duty existed when the evidence was lost; relevance alone does not establish that duty.
Why It Matters
The recommendation underscores the risks created when litigation-hold procedures are disconnected from device-management and employee-offboarding systems. A company that identifies a device as containing potentially relevant evidence must take concrete steps to preserve its data before the device is reset or reassigned.
It also illustrates the distinction between intentional deletion and sanctionable spoliation. Even deliberately deleted evidence will not support Rule 37(e) sanctions unless the movant proves that the deleting party had a preservation duty at the time.