Amazon changed employee's contract, and then sued him for disobeying it — but got hauled up in court

Carl and Amy Nelson were in a long-drawn legal battle with Amazon for four years after the e-commerce giant accused her husband of criminally violating his employment contract in 2019. Amy believed that their story should have been on the front page of every newspaper in America, but it wasn't. However, it did not stop her from voicing their truth. She took to TikTok (@amy_k_nelson) to share their side of the story, sat down with 10TV for their first-ever TV interview, and recently did a podcast with Mariana van Zeller on The Hidden Third (@thehiddenthirdpodcast).

In the March 24 clip, Amy revealed how Amazon fumbled the legal case by changing the terms of the contract to fit their narrative, not knowing that Carl Nelson had a copy of the original contract he signed. 

The Nelsons' legal battle began almost seven years ago in 2019 with an anonymous email that was sent to Jeff Bezos and his ethics team. It claimed that there were kickback schemes in land deals for the Amazon data centers that were located in Virginia. Things quickly escalated; by January 2020, Amazon lawyers reached out to federal prosecutors, and by April, the FBI paid a visit to Amy and her husband, which led to the Department of Justice (DOJ) serving them a civil asset forfeiture.

In simple terms, civil asset forfeiture is when law enforcement seizes an individual's property suspected of having criminal connections without needing a criminal conviction. With no access to their finances, they sold their home in Seattle and moved back to Columbus, where Amy's family lived. 

While on the podcast, Amy revealed that the prosecutors did not even ask to see Carl's employment terms. The e-commerce giant tried to sue her husband over a contract that he did not even sign. They found out that Amazon changed its contract after they went to Amazon's lawyers to tell them, "The terms you say that Carl owed to the company — those aren't his employment contract."

Amazon made the mistake of assuming Carl did not have his original contract. When Nelson's lawyers asked Amazon's legal team to show them the contract, they presented a new version of Carl's "employment contract," signed by someone with the same name.

Amy decided to do some digging herself and asked a friend, who is also an Amazon employee, to go on People Finder and look up her husband's name. They found another man with the same name who started working in 2017. The Nelsons brought the original contract and showed Amazon's lawyers the truth. The latter apologized and agreed that it was their mistake.

However, even though they were caught red-handed, that did not stop them from moving forward with the case. Amy revealed that Amazon employees have unique ID numbers, and a few Amazon HRs have even reached out to say, "There's no way that could have been a mistake." Amazon had already approached the DOJ and there was no going back.

The most shocking statement Amy shared from the company's lawyers was, "We don't read the contract the same way that you do." The case was dropped by the federal prosecutors four years later, after a judge said that Amazon could not prove it "suffered damages" among other reasons.

The Nelsons got back 85% ($765,000) of their seized assets, had zero criminal charges, and seven out of the eight claims were dismissed.

Most of the time, companies or businesses try to settle out of court instead of fighting a legal case because the latter is expensive and time-consuming. In the case of Amy and Carl Nelson, they had spent up to $3.7 million to prove their innocence. On the other hand, Amazon lawyers have risked half a billion on this case, showing just how expensive legal cases can be.

A judge studied thousands of patent cases to see whether the American judicial system favors individuals over companies. The findings revealed that when a case is decided by a jury, individuals win the case about 74% of the time, and big companies won only 26% of the legal battles.

Several people in the comments were shocked with what the Nelsons had to go through for four years. @antoni_montana referred to when they showed the Amazon lawyers the original employment contract and wrote, "Why inform them? I would’ve humiliated them in court and then use that as evidence when I sue them back."

@lawronin commented, "It's always bittersweet when an average citizen realizes how broken a system is because they become subject to it. Before they were subject to it, they are blissfully ignorant of how the system works, because they always feel, I dont break the law so doesnt effect me." @notmuchgetsinmyway added, "So glad Amy Nelson's story is getting more airtime! Keep letting the world know!"

You can follow Mariana van Zeller's podcast The Hidden Third (@thehiddenthirdpodcast) for more true crime and real-life stories.

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