San Francisco Jury Awards $20 Million to Wyndham Whistleblower Trish Williams

Trish Williams spent years selling timeshares for Wyndham Vacation Ownership, the largest timeshare company in the world, at its San Francisco location. In 2010 she went to her managers with a complaint about her own coworkers. Salespeople, she said, were cheating elderly buyers to close deals and pad commissions.

The conduct she described was specific. Sales staff opened credit cards in customers' names and maxed them out without permission. They lied about interest rates, maintenance fees, and the rental income owners could supposedly earn. They told buyers that if they spent enough, often hundreds of thousands of dollars, Wyndham would buy the timeshare back at full value on request, a promise the company had no intention of keeping. Many of the targeted customers were old, and some had trouble hearing or getting around.

Wyndham did not fix the problem. It fired Williams. She sued in San Francisco Superior Court, claiming she had been terminated in retaliation for reporting fraud against the company's own clients.

Christopher Dolan of the Dolan Law Firm, together with Anne Costin of Costin Law, tried the case to a jury over several weeks. They walked jurors through the sales floor culture, including an internal practice in which employees were encouraged to tell customers whatever it took to make a sale. The evidence connected Williams' firing directly to her decision to speak up.

In November 2016 the jury returned a verdict of more than $20 million. The award included $129,900.60 in lost past wages, $1,300,000 for emotional distress, and $18,570,100.16 in punitive damages. "I'm proud of it now," Williams said afterward. "I'm proud to be a whistleblower." Dolan said she had been determined to put the facts in front of twelve jurors and make the record public.

The punitive figure did not survive intact. In March 2017 the trial court cut the punitive damages from roughly $18.6 million to $12.8 million, citing the constitutional due process limits on such awards. In the same ruling the court declined to order a new trial, calling Wyndham's conduct "highly reprehensible" and describing the jury's award as "dispassionately sound."