Claims
5th Circuit rules Tokio Marine unit owes no defense in 'My 600-lb Life' suits
By Insurance Wire Staff, . Insurance Wire.
Philadelphia Indemnity Insurance Company, a unit of Tokio Marine Holdings, has no duty to defend lawsuits filed by former participants in the reality series 'My 600-lb Life,' the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled Monday, according to Business Insurance. The decision in Megalomedia Inc. v. Philadelphia Indemnity Insurance Company affirms a 2021 district court summary judgment in the insurer's favor.
Philadelphia had provided general liability coverage to Austin, Texas-based Megalomedia since 2010, Business Insurance reported. In 2011, the insurer added an endorsement excluding 'any/all reality shows' from coverage. In 2020, several former participants in the show, which follows people attempting to lose extreme weight, sued Megalomedia alleging negligence, infliction of emotional distress and related claims. Those underlying claims were dismissed in 2022.
On appeal, Megalomedia argued the term 'reality show' was too ambiguous to enforce the exclusion. The 5th Circuit rejected that argument on procedural grounds as much as substantive ones: Megalomedia had repeatedly told the lower court that 'My 600-lb Life' was a reality show, while arguing the exclusion should be read to cover such shows rather than exclude them from coverage. Having lost on that theory, the court held, Megalomedia could not reverse course. Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, writing for the majority, described the producer's position as '180-degree reversals worthy of an M. Night Shyamalan movie,' invoking 'The Sixth Sense,' 'Unbreakable' and 'The Exorcist' in the opinion, Business Insurance noted. Judge James C. Ho concurred, writing that courts waste time when litigants take opposite positions at successive stages of a case.
Judge Andrew S. Oldham dissented. He argued the term 'reality show' was ambiguous and undefined in the policy, and that the policy's coverage of documentaries, docuseries and docudramas significantly overlaps with the reality-show category. He also wrote that the court should have considered Megalomedia's revised legal theory on appeal because its underlying breach-of-contract claim had not changed, according to Business Insurance.
The dissent is worth noting for underwriters and coverage counsel. Oldham's reasoning, that genre categories in entertainment are genuinely porous and that an undefined exclusion may not hold against a well-constructed argument, signals that similar endorsements could face harder scrutiny in other circuits or in cases where the insured has not made the same procedural concessions Megalomedia did here. The 5th Circuit's majority effectively decided this case on estoppel grounds as much as on the plain meaning of 'reality show,' which limits how broadly the ruling travels.
For carriers writing general liability for production companies, the practical takeaway is that endorsement language excluding entertainment genres should be defined with specificity. A blanket 'any/all reality shows' exclusion survived here, but only because the insured's own litigation conduct foreclosed the ambiguity argument. Without that concession, Oldham's dissent suggests the outcome could have been different. Brokers placing coverage for production companies should expect renewed scrutiny of how genre exclusions are drafted and whether the underlying policy's coverage of documentary formats creates gaps or overlaps that neither party has fully mapped.
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