In the NEWS

KOIN 6 News | By Gabrielle Karol | September 18, 2018 A $40 million lawsuit alleges that a Portland property management company tried to cover up that asbestos was found during a renovation, putting employees’ and residents’ health at risk. Asbestos is a fiber known to cause cancer; it was commonly used in building materials before it was banned by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1989. The lawsuit, filed Monday in Multnomah County Circuit Court, claims that asbestos was found

KOIN 6 News | By Gabrielle Karol | May 14, 2018 Chrystal Devore said she first started feeling her manager at Umpqua Bank was unfriendly to working mothers when she was about to take maternity leave with her third child. But Devore said the problems got worse after she took parental leave to care for two of her children, who had fallen ill. “Everything was different when I came back,” Devore said. “My schedule was changed.” According to a complaint

CBS News | By CNN Wire | April 4, 2018 An Oregon woman has filed a $400,000 lawsuit after finding what she claims were mouse parts in her pre-packaged soup. Maesel Dorn, 72, says in the lawsuit that she ate the Pacific Foods organic soup twice after purchasing it from the Fred Meyer store in Wood Village. The first time she ate the soup, Dorn claims, she became “violently ill” afterwards and experienced mild hallucinations. Two days later, she again

Willamette Week | By Nigel Jaquiss | March 25, 2018 Duke Tran, a Damascus resident with an extraordinary past, was won a reported seven-figure settlement of a federal whistleblower lawsuit he filed against his former employer, Wells Fargo. “In 2014, according to Mr. Tran, his boss ordered him to lie to customers who were facing foreclosure,” the New York Times reports. “When Mr. Tran refused, he said, he was fired. He worried that he wouldn’t be able to make his

The New York Times | By Emily Flitter | March 24, 2018 After Duke Tran escaped from slavery, but before he became a millionaire, he was a Wells Fargo employee. He worked at the bank’s debt-collections center near Portland, Ore., talking on the phone to customers who owed Wells Fargo money. It wasn’t glamorous, but the job enabled him to afford a two-story suburban house with mustard-colored aluminum siding. After more than three decades in the United States, Mr. Tran

Oregon Public Broadcasting | By Dirk VanderHart | March 21, 2018 Faced with a multimillion-dollar injury lawsuit, Oregon state Sen. Rod Monroe, D-Portland, is now planning to demand records from a Portland newspaper and a tenant group to help fend off accusations the apartment complex he owns is unsafe. In recent days, Monroe’s attorneys have proposed serving subpoenas to Willamette Week and the activist group Portland Tenants United — attempting to force both to turn over records concerning two tenants

The Oregonian | By Aimee Green | March 17, 2018 Grand Central Bowling has agreed to pay $40 to each of its customer who were — unbeknownst to them — charged a 2 percent fee for their food, drinks or bowling games. Portland consumer attorney Michael Fuller said the bowling alley on Saturday agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit filed last November by a customer who only noticed the extra 2 percent tacked onto his $20 dining bill after an

TMZ | By Staff Writer | March 14, 2018 A transgender woman is suing Tinder on behalf of other transgender people living in the Portland area, claiming it rejects all transgender people from the dating service. Ariel Hawkins claims in a new lawsuit, obtained by TMZ, a few days ago she edited her profile to disclose that she was a pre-op trans woman. She says Tinder immediately deleted her account. She says the company sent her email saying she violated

ABA Journal | By Debra Weiss | February 15, 2018 A man has filed a $4 million lawsuit against Verizon Wireless that claims his fiancée’s nude photos inexplicably ended up on the phone of another person. Plaintiff Jeff Smith of Canby, Oregon, says Verizon promised that personal photos would be stored on protected and secure servers, but those assurances were false. And when he went to a Verizon store near Portland to complain, the worker said nothing could be done

The Oregonian | By Aimee Green | December 5, 2017 A 26-year-old man who thought he was being mugged last month at a Gresham Safeway filed a $400,000 lawsuit Monday after learning the man who grabbed him from behind was a loss-prevention officer at the store. Yousef Ramadan says he was carrying a basket of unpaid groceries with him when he took a step or two outside the doors of Safeway to look at a display of propane tanks for