[1] The plaintiffs charged the company with violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act, defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

[2][3] In May 2012,[4] the company sent a bill to Jen Palmer of Layton, Utah for $3,500[5] based on an anti-disparagement clause of their site's terms and conditions unless they agreed to take down the review.

[15][16] Kleargear ignored a December 16, 2013, deadline to respond to the offer, and Public Citizen sued the company in federal court for Fair Credit Reporting Act violations, defamation, and other torts.

[4] In March 2014, United States District Court judge Dee Benson entered a default judgment in favor of the Palmers.

Similar bans were introduced in both houses of Congress in 2015, and Jen Palmer testified live before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in November 2015.

[26][full citation needed] In April 2015, the Palmers and the Slates firm filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California to enforce the judgment by garnishment of Kleargear assets, including levies with credit card companies Discover Bank, American Express Centurion Bank, MasterCard International, and Visa Inc., as well as PayPal, Inc. against accounts held by Kleargear with those companies.

[27] Inspired by the Palmers' experience with KlearGear, the California legislature passed a bill in 2014 to ban the use of non-disparagement clauses in consumer contracts, and Governor Jerry Brown signed it into law on September 9, 2014.

[28] In September 2015, the Consumer Review Freedom Act of 2015 (S. 2044) was introduced in the U.S. Congress, to make such clauses void and unenforceable at the federal level.

[31] Among those scheduled to testify were Jen Palmer, a plaintiff in Palmer v. KlearGear; Adam Medros, vice-president of TripAdvisor; Daniel Castro, vice-president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation; Eric Goldman, a law professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law; and Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.