Ashley Madison Seeks to Arbitrate Claims in Data Breach Class Action

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The companies behind the extramarital dating website Ashley Madison are asking a federal judge to halt litigation over last summer’s data breach and refer the plaintiffs’ claims to private arbitration.

Defendants Avid Dating Life Inc. and Avid Life Media Inc. are facing a group of legal claims over an alleged data breach announced last summer.

The claims, including multiple Ashley Madison class action lawsuits, have been consolidated into a single multidistrict litigation, or MDL, in a federal court in Missouri.

Avid now seeks a court order that either stays court action on the plaintiff’s claims or dismisses them entirely so that they can be resolved by an arbitrator.

The Avid defendants run the Ashley Madison website, which helps dissatisfied spouses find someone to have an affair with.

Plaintiffs are current and former subscribers of the website who allege their personal information was exposed following a well-publicized data breach announced in July 2015.

Avid says all of the named plaintiffs agreed to Ashley Madison’s Terms and Conditions when they signed up for membership. Since March 17, 2011, those Terms and Conditions have included an agreement to arbitrate and a waiver of class action claims, the companies say.

Members who signed up before that date agreed to be bound by any subsequent changes to the Terms and Conditions – including the later addition of the arbitration clause, the companies claim.

Avid also argues that, instead of just putting the litigation on hold while the arbitration proceeds, the court can and should dismiss the claims outright if “it is clear the entire controversy between the parties will be resolved by arbitration.”

Plaintiffs argue Ashley Madison failed to properly secure the personal information of members who used the websites “Paid Delete” feature.

Paid Delete supposedly would remove all traces of the member’s use of the website, but plaintiffs say the defendants failed to secure the data related to the use of Paid Delete itself.

The MDL was established in December 2015 when the federal Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation consolidated all federal Ashley Madison lawsuits into a single court.

Plaintiffs in one Ashley Madison lawsuit requested the consolidation the previous August, arguing that the Eastern District of Missouri would be a reasonable choice of forum given the coast-to-coast origins of the many different plaintiffs.

Plaintiffs in the MDL had originally filed their claims under pseudonyms. But in a May 2016 order, U.S. District Judge John Ross required them to amend their complaints to put their real names on the record.

Judge Ross cited a “compelling public interest in open court proceedings, particularly in the context of a class action,” which in this case overrides the plaintiff’s desire to avoid any further intrusion on their privacy.

Lead plaintiffs’ counsel includes attorneys Douglas P. Dowd, William T. Dowd and Alex R. Lumaghi of Dowd & Dowd PC; John J. Driscoll, Christopher J. Quinn and Gregory G. Pals of The Driscoll Firm PC; and W. Lewis Garrison, Jr., Christopher B. Hood and Taylor C. Bartlett of Heninger Garrison Davis LLC.

The Ashley Madison Data Breach MDL is In re: Ashley Madison Customer Data Security Breach Litigation, Case No. 4:15-md-02669-JAR, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri.

UPDATE: On July 14, 2017, Ashley Madison’s parent company agreed to pay $11.2 million to settle claims arising from a data breach that revealed personal information about those using the adultery dating website.

 UPDATE 2: The Ashley Madison data breach class action settlement is now open. Click here to file a claim. 

UPDATE 3: On Jan. 31, 2018, Top Class Actions viewers who filed a valid claim for the Ashley Madison data breach class action settlement started receiving checks worth as much as $2,915. Congratulations to everyone who got PAID!