Trial underway over whether Newport car dealership shares responsibility for rape of customer
Trial began Monday in a lawsuit filed by a woman who alleges the mechanic who broke into her home and sexually assaulted her got her address from the Newport Beach Mercedes-Benz dealership where he worked.
Travis Dewayne Batten, 34, is serving a 107-year prison sentence for two separate attacks on Orange County women in their homes, including the 2005 assault on Karen Sommers, a nurse practitioner who lived in Newport Beach.
Sommers alleges that Batten’s employer, Fletcher Jones Motorcars, bore some responsibility for the assault. Her lawsuit claims Batten used the dealership’s computer system to look up Sommers’ address so he could rape her.
“He knew what he wanted and he knew where to go to get it,” Sommers’ attorney Christopher Rudd said Monday during his opening statement.
The Daily Pilot usually does not publish the names of victims of sexual crimes. But in Sommers’ case, she came forward with her allegations publicly.
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In 2013, Sommers filed a civil lawsuit in Orange County Superior Court against Fletcher Jones, seeking unspecified damages.
On Monday, as Rudd outlined the case against Fletcher Jones, he told jurors they’ll hear testimony from a former mechanic that he or any of his co-workers in the shop could access a customer’s name, phone number and address while a vehicle was in for repairs.
“Did they need that to do an oil change on a car?” Rudd said.
The dealership’s measures for protecting such information amounted to “Swiss cheese,” according to Rudd.
Sommers bought a car from Fletcher Jones in 2004 and regularly had it serviced there, according to her lawsuit.
In 2005, Rudd said, Sommers returned home from a gym to find a masked man in her Back Bay apartment.
Rudd said the man, later identified as Batten, used duct tape to restrain Sommers, dragged her to a bedroom and began tearing her clothes off.
Sommers fought back, Rudd said, and after Batten punched her on the head hard enough to break his hand, he fled – but not before warning Sommers that he would come back to kill her.
“The evidence will show Fletcher Jones didn’t do this to Miss Sommers,” Rudd said, but he added, “They allowed it to happen because they carelessly handled her personal information.”
Sommers’ doctor is expected to testify that the attack left her with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“She became a terrified, sleepless recluse,” Rudd said.
Speaking to the jury after Rudd, Fletcher Jones’ attorney Karl Lindegren foreshadowed how the defense may try to poke holes in the theory that Batten targeted Sommers.
Batten, Lindegren said, never worked on Sommers’ car and there’s no evidence that the two interacted at the dealership.
He said Batten got into Sommers’ home through an unlocked door and may have been trying to steal from the apartment, not lie in wait for her.
When Sommers arrived home from the gym, Lindegren said, “she saw he was as surprised as she was and said things like, ‘No one’s supposed to be here. I got a bum tip.’”
Lindegren also questioned whether someone’s phone number and address are indeed private information. He said Sommers was listed in the phone book in 2004, though her name was misspelled in the entry.
He contended that Fletcher Jones carefully guards truly sensitive information like customers’ financial data by keeping it on a separate computer system that mechanics can’t access.
Lindegren said jurors will see that Fletcher Jones carefully vets its employees.
Batten passed criminal background checks and drug tests when he originally applied for a job at the dealership in 2000 and when he returned in 2010 after briefly working elsewhere, according to Lindegren. Batten was arrested in the Sommers case in 2011.
“People thought he was a nice guy,” Lindegren said. “They were mistaken.”
But the fault, he told jurors, lies with Batten, not Fletcher Jones.
“They shouldn’t be held responsible because one guy did a very bad thing,” Lindegren said.
If jurors decide Fletcher Jones is at fault, they will have to determine how much Sommers should get in compensation.
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Jeremiah Dobruck, jeremiah.dobruck2@latimes.com
Twitter: @jeremiahdobruck
