It started, as so many Florida lawsuits do, with the neighbors.
Sloan’s Curve is a Palm Beach condominium community where Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter, the former Marvel Entertainment chairman whose company Disney acquired in 2009 for roughly four billion dollars, lived in the same community as a man named Harold Peerenboom. The two had clashed for years over how the place was run. Then the mailings began. Friends, business associates, and Peerenboom’s neighbors started receiving anonymous letters accusing him of monstrous things, up to and including murder and child molestation.
Peerenboom sued the Perlmutters for defamation, claiming they were behind the campaign. The Perlmutters answered with a counter-suit alleging something that reads less like a Palm Beach HOA dispute than a John Grisham subplot. According to the counter-suit, Peerenboom and his insurance-defense lawyer, William Douberley, had engineered a pretextual deposition in an unrelated case for the sole purpose of harvesting the Perlmutters’ DNA from objects they touched and left behind. Peerenboom, the counterclaims went on, then leaned on a private lab until it produced results purporting to tie Laura Perlmutter’s DNA to the hate mail, results he then handed to the Palm Beach Police Department and the press.
When the Perlmutters moved to amend their counterclaims to add punitive damages, the trial court let them. The Fourth District Court of Appeal, sitting en banc, reversed. And on June 11, 2026, the Florida Supreme Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Muñiz, quashed the Fourth District and reset the rules statewide for how every Florida trial court must handle a motion to plead punitives. Perlmutter v. Federal Insurance Co., No. SC2024-0058 (Fla. June 11, 2026).
What the Court actually held
Florida Statutes § 768.72(1) requires a “reasonable showing by evidence” before a plaintiff can even plead punitive damages. For decades the district courts fractured over what that showing entails. The Fourth District demanded what amounted to a mini-trial. The judge took in everyone’s evidence, the defense’s included, and asked whether a reasonable jury could find punitive conduct by clear and convincing evidence. That was the trial-level standard, imported to the pleading stage. The Second and Fifth Districts said no; the pleading-stage gate sits far lower.
The Supreme Court came down decisively on the Second/Fifth side, in two crisp holdings.
First, the record at a § 768.72(1) hearing is one-sided. The trial court considers only the claimant’s evidence. Defense counter-submissions are off the table. The defendant may argue the law and the sufficiency of the proffer, but it cannot put in competing affidavits and exhibits to muddy the picture.
Second, “clear and convincing” belongs to the jury. That standard, found in § 768.72(2), governs the verdict, not the judge’s gatekeeping call on amendment. The pleading-stage question is simply whether a reasonable person could conclude, on the claimant’s evidence, that the defendant engaged in intentional misconduct or gross negligence as statutorily defined.
The certified question, whether trial courts must view the “totality of the evidence” through a clear-and-convincing lens, got a one-word answer. No.
Why this matters far beyond Palm Beach
Punitive damages practice in Florida just became dramatically more plaintiff-friendly, and the change ripples outward in three directions.
Start with insurance bad faith and trucking, dockets that live and die on punitives. Under the old Fourth District rule, defendants routinely filed thick counter-proffers (depositions, expert affidavits, corporate compliance binders) designed to make the trial judge balk. That tactic is now foreclosed. Defense counsel can argue, but cannot evidence.
Then financial-worth discovery. Section 768.72(1) was originally enacted in 1986 precisely to stop plaintiffs from using punitive damages claims as a pry bar into a defendant’s bank accounts. The Court reaffirmed that gatekeeping purpose, and Simeon, Inc. v. Cox, 671 So. 2d 158 (Fla. 1996), still governs. But the Court lowered the bar to clear it. Expect a near-term spike in financial-worth discovery against wealthy and corporate defendants.
And forum. Because the Fourth District’s Perlmutter rule was the strictest in the state, defendants with venue choices had a real reason to prefer Broward, Palm Beach, and the Treasure Coast. That advantage just evaporated. Plaintiffs will feel freer to file punitive-heavy cases in the Fourth District, and defendants have one item fewer on their forum-shopping checklist.
The quiet question the Court left open
Chief Justice Muñiz reaffirmed that § 768.72(1) “creates a substantive legal right not to be subjected to a punitive damages claim” until the gate is cleared. The opinion is conspicuously light, though, on what remedy a defendant has when a trial court gets it wrong under the new, easier standard. Interlocutory appeal of orders granting leave to amend remains available under Florida Rule of Appellate Procedure 9.130(a)(3)(G). But the scope of that review, when the trial court’s job is now to look only at the plaintiff’s evidence and apply a “reasonable person could conclude” test, just got narrower in practice.
In other words, the gate is still there. It just swings open more easily, and the latch is harder to inspect on appeal.
As for the Perlmutters themselves, the case goes back to the Fourth District to apply the new standard. On remand, the question is no longer whether a reasonable jury could find by clear and convincing evidence that Peerenboom and Douberley engineered a covert DNA sting and a bullied lab report. It is the materially easier question of whether the Perlmutters’ proffer, taken on its own without Peerenboom’s contrary affidavits, would let a reasonable person conclude that might have happened.
Given what the Perlmutters have already put in the record, that is a much shorter walk.
Read the full opinion at 2026 FL 6699. Decided June 11, 2026, by Chief Justice Muñiz for the Florida Supreme Court.