CHICAGO — The Illinois Supreme Court said a state appeals panel shouldn’t have voided $7 million in punitive damages awarded to a woman who accused her wealthy ex-boyfriend of sexual assault.
Justice Mary Jane Theis wrote the panel’s opinion, filed Nov. 18, with concurrence from Justices Rita Garman, Michael Burke, David Overstreet and Robert Carter. Justices Anne Burke and P. Scott Neville did not participate in the decision.
According to the opinion, an unnamed woman identified only as Jane Doe sued Beau Parrillo in December 2016 with allegations of a domestic violence incident at her Chicago home on Oct. 5, 2015, and several subsequent incidents in December and March, when she was staying at hotels in both Chicago and Lombard. Trial evidence included a radiology report and hospital discharge instructions, as well as text message exchanges between the parties.
Several months of legal wrangling led to a Jan. 15, 2019, judgment entry of a $9 million jury verdict, including five $200,000 awards for loss of normal life, pain and suffering, emotional distress, future loss of normal life and future pain and suffering and another $8 million in punitive damages.
Following that judgment, several more months of litigation ensued. Multiple attorneys appeared on Parrillo’s behalf at least once, and the Supreme Court opinion details consistent conflict between Cook County Judge James Varga and lawyers who repeatedly sought continuances and tried to reschedule hearings on little notice.
On June 5, 2019, Varga denied Parrillo’s posttrial motion and issued an order in which he said Parrillo and his lawyers committed “the most audacious attempt to undermine the judicial process which this court has seen in over 24 years.”
The First District Appellate Court affirmed every aspect of the ruling except the punitive penalty, determining “punitive damages eight times the amount of compensatory damages crosses” the line of constitutional impropriety. The panel reduced the punitive award to $1 million, which the woman appealed to the Supreme Court. Parrillo also petitioned the high court for his own relief.
Theis explained that the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1991 opinion in Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. v. Haslip, established a punitive damage award could be large enough on its own to violate due process, but did not establish a mathematical formula applicable to every case. It refined the issue in 1996 through BMW of North America v. Gore, establishing standards for reviewing penalties and the notion that “single-digit multipliers are more likely to comport with due process, while still achieving the state’s goals of deterrence and retribution.”
The panel said the woman’s injuries “were undoubtedly physical” and that evidence established Parrillo’s conduct as “actual intent to harm her on five occasions.” Theis quoted Judge Varga’s determination the woman was the victim of rape as well as physical and psychological assault.
“We have no hesitation in concluding that Parrillo’s conduct was egregiously reprehensible,” Theis wrote, adding that Gore established violent offenses can generally lead to stiffer penalties. The panel noted the allegations against Parrillo “could have exposed him to criminal liability,” and quoted a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court opinion in State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. v. Campbell, which added to Gore and established “the remote possibility of a criminal sanction does not automatically sustain a punitive damages award.”
But based on the woman’s testimony, as well as jury instructions — including one lifted nearly verbatim from Cambpell — the $8 million award “was not unconstitutionally excessive,” Theis wrote, adding the ruling was “based on the facts and circumstances of Parrillo’s egregiously reprehensible conduct that directly resulted in repeated personal, physical and emotional harm.”
The panel also fully rejected Parrillo’s cross-motion for relief. It reversed the appellate court’s reduction of the damage award while affirming the remainder of its ruling and the entirely of the circuit court judgment.
Doe was represented in the case by attorneys Daniel J. Voelker, of Voelker Litigation Group, of Chicago, and Randall B. Gold, of Fox & Fox, of Monona, Wisconsin.
Parrillo was represented by attorneys Ronald F. Neville, Terence J. Mahoney and Jennifer Mann, of the firm of Neville & Mahoney, of Chicago.