A class action against a company accused of charging more for razors targeted for women than ones for men will not go back to a Missouri state court, a federal judge ruled on March 31.
U.S. District Judge Stephen R. Clark of the Eastern District of Missouri’s Eastern Division denied Carla Been’s motion to remand the case to the Circuit Court of St. Louis County, where she originally filed the suit.
Been sued Edgewell Personal Care Company and its other entities for allegedly violating the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act by charging more for Shick’s Quattro for Women razor than the Quattro Titanium for men. The case was removed to federal court under the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) of 2005.
The plaintiff agreed in a previous filing that the defendant properly removed the case to federal court, thereby waiving her opportunity.
Been's motion claimed that the CAFA doesn’t apply here because of a local controversy exception. The defendants responded that she forfeited that when she failed to show that Missouri residents represent at least two-thirds of a class.
The exception reads that a district court won’t have jurisdiction via CAFA if “greater than two-thirds of the members of all proposed plaintiff classes in the aggregate are citizens of the state in which the action was originally filed,” the judge's order said.
Been and the proposed class is represented by Daniel Harvath of Webster Groves.
"The Defendants violated the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act...by employing gender-discriminatory pricing schemes in charging substantially more for a female-marketed version of a materially-identical-if-not-inferior product than Defendants charge for the corresponding male-marketed version," the complaint states.
U.S. District Court for Eastern District of Michigan case number 4:19-cv-02602 S