Over the 44 years since Apple was founded by Steves Jobs and Wozniak, it has been the defendant in many lawsuits. But a lawsuit filed in March 2019 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri by Raevon Terrell Parker, just might be the strangest one of all time.
According to Patently Apple (via
AppleInsider) that suit sought an award in the amount of “$2 trillion and $900 USD and a priceless item” from
Apple. The plaintiff claimed that he went into an Apple Store in October 2018 to repair his
iPhone 7 and that is when things became rather strange.
Parker brought his
iPhone 7 to the
Saint Louis Galleria Apple Store where his handset was repaired by the store’s staff that same day. But Parker said that the store never returned the original device and “kept it by deceiving the plaintiff knowing that it was the first phone to have new features.” Instead, the plaintiff accused the Apple Store of swapping his phone for a replacement model forcing him to replicate his settings from the original unit, reset passwords, and re-install App Store purchases.
The plaintiff said in the suit that one of the unique features on his handset let his iPhone “bypass certain start-up load screen options,” allowing his device to “communicate with other devices faster and more accurately.” In addition, Parker demanded in his filing to be compensated for the “discovery of the Group FaceTime feature.” He also claimed that the new features that he said his iPhone 7 possessed were used in the creation of iOS 12. As a result, Parker demanded to be compensated for the creation of that software.
In May 2019 Apple was able to convince the court that Parker’s complaint did not include a
motion and the case was dismissed. That suit included an itemized breakdown of Parker’s monetary demands which includes a $1 trillion valuation for his iPhone 7, another trillion bucks for the version of iOS 12 that he claimed to create, and $900 for the rental of his iPhone by Apple. And that suit valued “Raevon Terrell Parker’s mentality” as “priceless.” So the bottom line was that Apple was being asked to pay a total of “$2 trillion and $900 USD and a priceless item.”
While Apple was able to get the judge to dismiss this case, Parker filed a new one on June 1st, 2020 asking for a trial by jury. In the new filing, he adds that Apple owes him for “iOS 12.0.1 and later” and “iOS 13 and later” because he holds the patents to both builds of Apple’s mobile operating system. The new filing asks for one trillion dollars “due to hospitalizations, travel, distress, humiliation, embarrassment, defamation of character.” Parker notes that “I don’t think that the plaintiff can be compensated for being labeled crazy.”
The new suit, which was filed out in Parker’s own handwriting, explains that he is entitled to the damages because “On October 29, 2018, Raevon Parker went to the Apple Store in Saint Louis device Galleria for a malfunction of his cellular device. The attendant in the Apple Store fixed the device but kept it by deceiving the Plaintiff knowing that it was the first phone to have new features.”
The court has yet to schedule a date for any hearings on the matter. While we are not attorneys (and we don’t play one on television), we would assume that Apple will once again quickly seek to have this suit dismissed for one reason or another. To be honest, though, we’d love to see this proceed to trial just to see what kind of evidence the plaintiff presents in the courtroom.
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