In Jones v. Riot Hospitality Group, LLC 95 F.4th 730 (9th Cir. 2024), the plaintiff’s case was dismissed for her actions in deleting text messages. The reasoning:
Jones contends that the district court erred in finding intent because Kuchta could not confirm that every deletion of a text message was intentional or quantify the intentional deletions. But there was ample circumstantial evidence that Jones intentionally destroyed a significant number of text messages and collaborated with others to do so. As the district court noted, Jones could not explain why messages to other employees at the bar were selectively deleted in 2017 and 2018. With respect to the 2019 and 2020 messages, the court pointed out that “while much of the content of the deleted messages is unknowable,” a screenshot of a 736*736 message sent by a witness to Jones but missing from Jones’ phone in its original form, “shows that Plaintiff deleted at least one message that had a direct bearing on her case.” Jones, 2022 WL 3682031 at *10. Moreover, Jones and one of the witnesses obtained new phones shortly after they were ordered to hand over their devices for imaging. Neither Jones nor the witnesses produced the earlier phones for imaging, effectively preventing discovery of messages deleted from those phones. The court’s conclusion “that [Jones] affirmatively selected certain text messages for deletion while otherwise preserving text messages sent around the same time” is supported by the record. Id.