When an NDA Attempts to Quell Negative Reviews

You know when you’re buying a PlayStation out of the back of a van in an alleyway and the salesperson says “don’t tell anyone where you got this”? Or when you eat at your favorite Italian restaurant, someone gets blown away, and the big guys squeezes your face in his giant hands and explains “you didn’t see nothing”?

Situations where you’d kinda maybe want to be able to say something, or at least you feel a bit sketchy in that you can’t say anything, right?

What if you got that same feeling from a medical professional?

That’s exactly what happened at Allure Esthetic in Seattle, where more than 10,000 clients were made to sign non-disclosure agreements before receiving treatment, but after they had paid a consultation fee (blackmail, much?).

In addition to preventing negative reviews through the illegal NDA, the office also is accused of:

intimidating and bribing patients to remove negative reviews, ordering its employees to post fake positive ones, and altering “before and after” photos to misrepresent the actual results of procedures…

If you think that’s bad, just wait.

Allure considered anything below FOUR STARS to be a negative review, and followed up with clients in attempts to “make it right” through money/free services (if they accepted, they were made to sign a second NDA, specifically requiring that negative reviews be removed and not posted in the future).

So what’s here to make things right? A federal judge. A federal judge saying that federal laws were broken. We’ll have to wait and see how this pans out.