Tennessee Supreme Court Rules Privacy Lawsuit Survives Death After Nursing Home Aide Exposed Resident

In 2019, Annie Jones, an elderly resident of Life Care Center of Tullahoma with severe cognitive impairment, was receiving help with bathing from a certified nursing aide. During the shower, the aide accepted a personal video call from her incarcerated boyfriend. The jail's monitoring system captured what followed: Ms. Jones's nude body was visible to everyone on the call.

Ms. Jones could not consent to being seen. She was not aware the call was happening. A lawsuit was filed on her behalf through her conservatorship, asserting that the aide's conduct constituted intrusion upon seclusion, one of the four recognized branches of invasion of privacy under Tennessee law.

The trial court dismissed the case. It reasoned that because Ms. Jones had no awareness of the incident, she suffered no cognizable injury. Attorneys Richard Piliponis and Benjamin Miller of The Higgins Firm appealed. The Court of Appeals reversed, holding that awareness is not a required element of the intrusion-upon-seclusion tort and that actual damages are not a threshold condition for the claim.

Ms. Jones died while the appeal was pending. Life Care Centers argued that the lawsuit should die with her, placing the case within the common-law rule that personal injury actions abate at death unless a statute preserves them. The Tennessee Supreme Court, in an April 2025 opinion authored by Chief Justice Holly Kirby, disagreed. The Court held that Tennessee Code Annotated section 20-5-102 preserves 'civil actions founded on wrongs,' and that intrusion upon seclusion qualifies. Because the tort does not turn on personal characteristics of the plaintiff, the claim survives and the estate may pursue it.

The ruling settles a previously open question in Tennessee: a defendant cannot extinguish a privacy claim simply by waiting for a vulnerable plaintiff to die. No damages figure has been established; the case was remanded for further proceedings.