Following on the heels of Plaintiff Joshua Thorne’s TCPA suit, the Donald J. Trump campaign was hit with a second TCPA lawsuit in as many days. See Roberts v. Donald J. Trump For President, Inc., No. 16-4676 (N.D. Ill. Apr. 26, 2016). The Roberts Complaint concerns the same message (“Reply YES to subscribe to Donald J. Trump for President. Your subscription will help Make America Great Again! Msg&data rates may apply.”) and has been assigned to the same judge (Judge John Z. Lee) as the Thorne Complaint. The Roberts Complaint, however, differs in a couple of key respects.
First, Roberts was filed by different plaintiffs’ counsel. Second, Roberts includes additional allegations regarding how the Trump campaign purportedly obtained the phone numbers it texted: Roberts claims that he was required to provide his cell phone number to Event Brite when obtaining a free ticket for a March 11, 2016 Trump campaign rally, but that neither Event Brite nor the Trump campaign obtained plaintiff’s prior express consent to text him.
Third, the plaintiff in Roberts also purports to represent a slightly different class: while the purported class in Thorne is defined as nationwide class of all individuals who, during the last four years, did not provide their cell phone numbers to the Trump campaign but nonetheless received a text regarding the campaign, the purported class in Roberts is defined as a nationwide class of all individuals since June 2015 who provided their cell phone numbers to Event Brite to obtain a ticket to attend a Trump-related event and received a text from the Trump campaign despite not providing prior express consent to the Trump campaign.
