There have been a couple responses to something I wrote on the Louise Ogborn case from last week. Here's my response to those responses.

Louise Ogborn was horribly mistreated and wrongfully imprisoned, and the people who did what they did to her deserve all the prison time they get.

But to file a $200M lawsuit against McDonald's for failing to train its managers properly is ridiculous. Again, I ask -- if it's necessary to tell your management staff not to listen to unknown voices on the phone who tell them to imprison, strip search and sexually assault other employees, then what else do you have include in the training? Don't light one another's hair on fire? Defecating in the shake machine is a no-no? If a customer asks for no pickles, you shouldn't beat him to death with a bag of frozen fries?

By the way, here's the exact language from the McDonald's training manual (at least according to McDonald's):

"Under no circumstances should any member of McDonald's management or staff conduct a search of any employee or customer's person. No legitimate law enforcement agency would ever ask you to conduct such a search. If someone claiming to be a law enforcement official requests that a manager or employee conduct a strip search, or any search of another employee or customer, try to obtain the name and phone number of the caller and immediately call your local police department to report the incident. Contact your owner/operator or security manager about the incident as soon as possible. If you believe you have reason to search an employee's personal possessions (for example, a backpack, purse, etc.), contact your owner/operator or security manager for guidance beforehand. You should never detain any employee or other individual from leaving the premises against his or her will."

Sounds pretty clear to me, and McDonald's has also been sending updates to its franchises on the hoax calls. However, if you read this Courier-Journal story, you'll find that a McDonald's executive admitted it didn't appear word filtered down to the employees. I'm not sure what that means.

There's more confusion. According to the original 20/20 story, the assistant manager closes the door and locks it, then gives Ogborn a choice -- submit to a search or go to the local police station. But according to the Courier-Journal story from above, Ogborn begged to be taken the police station. So, which is it?

I know the argument NSLC is making, and it's a valid one -- you don't know what you would do in a given situation until you're actually in it yourself. And yes, I'm aware the managers were larger than her. But at what point do you fight back? There was no threat to her life, no weapon.

From my personal viewpoint, I know I would have been screaming and attempting to go out at the point the assistant manager locked the door. There's absolutely no reason an employee (or anyone, for that matter) should be locked into an office, least of all in a McDonald's. An employee who doesn't grasp that fact, well, I don't know if I can get a grip on where they're coming from.

People point to the Milgram experiments as proof of many people's willingness to accept meekly what they are told by authority figures. Fine -- but if you aren't going to protect yourself in a situation that appears to have no life-threatening overtones, how much sympathy can you then expect after the fact?

It comes down to a question of how much blame you're willing to assign someone for a situation in which they never should have been. While I'm gladly willing to throw the assistant manager and her (now former) fiance under the prison bus, I also don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone to defend themselves under the circumstances Ogborn was in.