Open Floodgates to Personal Injury? RICO Claims Post-Horn

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”) is well known for having outgrown its original purpose. No longer a mere tool for prosecuting the mob, today it casts a net over a range of garden variety business disputes, serving as the hook for treble damages where other common law or statutory claims do not yield the same multiple. As one court put it, “plaintiffs have often been overzealous in pursuing RICO claims, flooding federal courts by dressing up run-of-the-mill fraud claims as RICO violations.” DLJ Mortg. Cap., Inc. v. Kontogiannis, 726 F. Supp. 2d 225, 236 (E.D.N.Y. 2010).

The Supreme Court’s latest ruling in Med. Marijuana, Inc. v. Horn, 604 U.S. 593 (2025) further stretches the statute’s ambit, extending it to personal injuries that purportedly give way to commercial harm. This past April, in an opinion from Justice Barrett, the Court held that a RICO plaintiff may seek damages for business or property loss even if those losses resulted from a personal injury. In so holding, the Court made clear that the language of the statute expressly permitting recovery for harm to “business or property” implicitly excludes recovery for harm to one’s person.[1] Nonetheless, if harm to one’s person in turn causes harm to one’s business or property, then liability for those injuries fall within RICO’s purview.[2]

Given all the ways that bodily harm, emotional distress, or reputational ruin—all forms of personal injury—can impact one’s commercial interests, Horn seemed an open invitation to the plaintiff’s bar. Armed with a license from the Supreme Court, wouldn’t they clog the federal courts with RICO claims borne out of once traditional state law causes of action?

Not quite. Six months later, the expected proliferation has yet to ensue, federal courts relying instead on RICO’s many pleading requirements as a way to cabin the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The Supreme Court’s Expansion of RICO Liability

Douglas Horn is a commercial truck driver who sued a medical marijuana company for selling him CBD (i.e. cannabidiol) products falsely advertised as free of THC (i.e. tetrahydrocannabinol). He alleged that the medical marijuana company was a RICO enterprise engaged in marketing, distributing, and selling CBD, and that the company’s false and misleading advertisement of its products as THC-free met the elements of mail and wire fraud, crimes constituting a pattern of racketeering under RICO.[3]

The case hinged on whether the truck driver’s injuries gave rise to a RICO cause of action. The driver claimed he was harmed when he unwittingly ingested a product containing THC because it caused him to fail his employer’s drug screening, which eventually caused him to be fired from his job.[4] The Western District of New York held that because the driver’s lost employment originated from an injury to his person—i.e. the introduction of THC into his system—his RICO claim was foreclosed as that cause of action is only available to a “person injured in his business or property.”[5] The Second Circuit reversed, holding that neither the text nor structure of Section 1964(c) imposes an “antecedent-personal-injury-bar,” meaning the statute does not bar a person from suing for injuries to his business or property that are derivative of harm to his person.[6]

The case made its way to the Supreme Court, which granted certiorari to resolve a split among the circuits on the same issue, the Second and Ninth Circuits interpreting Section 1964(c) as encompassing economic loss emanating from personal injuries, and the Sixth, Seventh, and Eleventh Circuits interpreting that section as precluding such relief.[7] The question decided by the Supreme Court was whether civil RICO confers standing on plaintiffs to recover for business or property harms arising from a personal injury.[8]

The Supreme Court held that it did, reasoning that Section 1964(c)’s requirement of injury to “business or property” delineates the kinds of harm for which a RICO plaintiff can recover, as opposed to the causes of harm for which the plaintiff can recover.[9] Therefore, as long as plaintiffs are pursuing damages for business or property loss, it does not matter whether these kinds of losses were caused by a personal injury. To illustrate, the Court gave the example of a gas station owner beaten in a robbery. Although the statute bars the owner from recovering for his pain and suffering, as these are solely injuries to his person, if these same injuries lead him to shut down operations, then he can bring a RICO claim for recovery of the loss of his business.[10]

Aware of the implications of its decision on RICO’s boundaries, the Court strove to emphasize the narrowness of its holding, stressing that it was not deciding whether ingestion of THC was a personal injury or whether loss of employment was a business injury.[11] The district and appellate court were tasked with answering those questions on remand.[12] The Supreme Court only determined that business injuries caused by personal ones are recoverable under RICO.

Judicial Reliance on Horn

Reputational damage, a type of personal injury, is often argued as giving way to business injury, plaintiffs claiming that the harm to their reputation caused them to lose their jobs or their professional standing. As mentioned, the Supreme Court expressed no opinion in Horn on whether employment loss was a RICO business injury. Since then, courts have been wary of concluding that the commercial effects of reputational damage transform ordinary state law claims into federal RICO ones. The Northern District of Illinois held in Tuma v. Hawthorne Race Course, Inc, 2025 WL 2098700 (N.D. Ill. July 25, 2025) that even when coupled with and tied to loss of employment, harm to one’s professional credibility is not compensable through RICO because the injury is purely personal.[13] The court cited Horn in its ruling, reiterating the Supreme Court’s holding that the text of the statute implicitly excluded recovery for harm to one’s person.[14] Similarly, the Southern District of Ohio held in Brown-Austin v. Chambers-Smith, 2025 WL 2022262 (S.D. Ohio July 18, 2025) that an inmate could not plead a RICO claim against his prison because his emotional distress injuries were personal, despite the inmate’s implied allegation that his emotional  distress cost him a scholarship that would have affected his future earnings.[15] In Brown, too, the court cited the portion of the Horn decision holding that RICO’s text excluded personal injuries.[16]

In contradistinction, in Hafez v. Vidino, 2025 WL 2800719 (D.D.C. Sept. 30, 2025) the United States District Court for the District of Columbia held that Horn paved the way for RICO plaintiffs to recover damages for lost professional credibility from reputational injury.[17] Thus a visiting scholar alleging harm to his academic business relationships because of the reputational injury brought on by publication of false information about him could state a claim satisfying RICO’s “business” injury element.[18] Still, his ability to allege business injury did not excuse him from sufficiently alleging RICO’s other elements, including the “high standard for alleging a pattern of racketeering activity.”[19] The court found that the scholar could not meet this standard because he failed to allege that the publication of false information was done with intent to defraud, fraud being a predicate offense for pleading a pattern of racketeering.[20] As such, he did not have a RICO claim notwithstanding the court’s recognition that Horn enlarged the sorts of claims RICO embraces.

Built-in Constraints Limit Personal Injury Based RICO Claims

As reflected in the above decisions, the courts’ stance on the viability of RICO claims generated from personal injuries appears unchanged. This may be attributed to the several additional hurdles to pleading and proving a RICO claim, a point expounded upon in Horn.

For starters, alleging a business injury by itself is insufficient. A pattern of racketeering activity must be pled, which requires identifying two or more predicate crimes.[21] In Horn, these two predicate offenses were mail and wire fraud on account of the marijuana company’s supposedly misleading marketing, distribution, and sale of CBD products. However, in the absence of two or more predicate crimes, a RICO claim premised on business injury from a single tort is not allowed.

Also, Section 1964(c)’s meaning of “business” injury need not embody all manner of economic harm. Not only did the Supreme Court leave open whether the truck driver’s employment loss was a business injury, but it indicated that certain monetary losses, for instance medical expenses, may not qualify as RICO business injuries.[22] This too is a barrier to asserting RICO claims coming about from personal injuries.

Most importantly, a direct causal relationship is needed between the racketeering activity alleged and the business injury asserted.[23] To quote Justice Barrett, “foreseeability does not cut it.”[24] Applying this to the truck driver in Horn, the number of links in the chain between the marijuana company’s THC-free misrepresentations and the driver’s job loss suggest that the heavy causation burden is probably not met. On the driver’s telling, the misrepresentations caused him to ingest THC and fail a drug test, after which his refusal to complete an employer mandated substance abuse program led his employer to fire him.[25] It is easily arguable from these facts that there is no RICO violation because the direct cause of the driver’s job loss was neither the ingestion of THC nor the failed drug test, but his refusal to complete a substance abuse program. Like the truck driver, all other RICO plaintiffs must overcome similar direct causation challenges before they can get to treble damages.

Taken together, the totality of these preexisting obstacles in RICO jurisprudence minimize Horn’s influence.

Conclusion: All Eyes on New York’s Western District

At least for now, the floodgates remain fairly shut to RICO claims flowing from personal injury. But, the truck driver’s story in Horn is not over, continuing on remand in the Western District of New York where questions unanswered by the Supreme Court are pending adjudication. In particular, the Western District of New York must determine whether the driver experienced a business injury when he lost his job after unknowingly ingesting THC.[26] In reserving judgment on the issue, the Supreme Court was sure to note that not every monetary harm, such as job loss, is a RICO business injury.

The Western District’s—and possibly Second Circuit’s—weigh-in is significant as it sets the stage for other courts to follow suit. It should be remembered here that before Horn came to the Supreme Court, the Western District had ruled that the truck driver lacked RICO standing because his job loss sprang from a personal injury. To the extent this overturned ruling is any indication, the Western District may be predisposed to finding that lost employment is not a business injury for RICO purposes, a holding that mostly keeps RICO within its pre-Horn confines without disturbing Supreme Court precedent.

Were the court to reach the opposite conclusion, there lies the prospect of an explosion of personal injury RICO claims jamming federal dockets. Even so, in view of the various impediments to civil RICO claims courts have already read into the statute, personal injury-based claims will likely be kept at bay, the majority perhaps being dismissed on the pleadings alone.

Ultimately, input from the Western District of New York will move the needle one way or another on the contours of commercial harms that are RICO business injuries. In the meantime, while Horn plays out on remand, it is left to be seen how future federal courts will treat harms to the person that, because of Horn, are going to continue to crop up in the RICO context.

[1]Med. Marijuana, Inc. v. Horn, 604 U.S. 593, 601 (2025).

[2]Id.

[3]Id. at 598.

[4]Id. at 597-98.

[5]Id. at 598.

[6]Id. at 598-99.

[7]Id. at 599-600.

[8]Id. at 600.

[9]Id. at 601.

[10]Id.

[11]Id. at 600.

[12]Id. at 614.

[13]2025 WL 2098700, at *4 .

[14]Id.

[15]2025 WL 2022262, at *5-6 .

[16]Id. at 6.

[17]2025 WL 2800719, at *5.

[18]Id.

[19]Id. at *6.

[20]Id.

[21]Horn, 604 U.S. at 613.

[22]Id.

[23]Id. at 612.

[24]Id.

[25]Id. at 597-98.

[26]While the case was referred to mediation on September 30, 2025, this does not mean that a ruling from the court is no longer a possibility.

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