The Eric Schmidt Arbitration Award Stands: A Post-Dispute Clause Puts the EFAA Out of Reach

A Los Angeles judge let the Eric Schmidt arbitration award stand, and the reason is a date

On 24 September 2026 a Los Angeles Superior Court judge refused to vacate the arbitration award that ended Michelle Ritter's sexual assault case against former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, telling Ritter she appeared to have ignored the arbitrator's orders in much the way she had disregarded the court's; Law360 reported the award left in place as a $12 million award in Schmidt's favor, and the Associated Press had earlier reported the arbitrator's 29 April 2026 ruling as ordering Ritter to pay $10.7 million in damages, with the total expected to increase in a final ruling. The Eric Schmidt arbitration award survives not because a court weighed the assault allegations, and not because anyone litigated unconscionability, but because of a calendar: the settlement and arbitration agreement the parties signed in December 2024 came after the alleged assaults of 2021 and 2023 and after the disputes about them had arisen, which put it outside the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act.

That single sequencing point is the practitioner story, and it is the one no general-news account of the case has told. The EFAA, codified at 9 U.S.C. §§ 401–402, does not invalidate arbitration agreements that cover sexual assault disputes. It invalidates predispute arbitration agreements, at the election of the person alleging the conduct. An arbitration clause executed after the parties are already adverse is not a predispute agreement, and no amount of sexual assault subject matter converts it into one. In Ritter v. Schmidt, No. 25STCV26114, that distinction moved a case with rape allegations, surveillance allegations and a nine-figure business dispute out of open court and into a private proceeding that ended with the claimant owing the respondent eight figures.

What did the judge decide in Ritter v. Schmidt on 24 September 2026?

The court declined to vacate the arbitral award and left the arbitrator's findings intact. Reporting on the 24 September hearing records the judge observing that Ritter appeared to have ignored the arbitrator's orders just as she had disregarded his own — a characterization of the record, not a holding on the merits of her assault allegations, and a signal that the court treated her procedural complaints as self-inflicted rather than as arbitrator misconduct.

The distinction matters because vacatur is not an appeal. A California court asked to set aside an award under the California Arbitration Act does not review the arbitrator's factual findings or legal conclusions for error; it asks only whether one of the enumerated statutory defects occurred. Ritter's public criticism of the proceeding — that she had not been allowed to provide evidence, and that the arbitrator's comments about her were "false, disparaging, and defamatory" — reads as an appeal on the merits dressed in the language of process. Courts routinely reject that framing, and this court did.

Two features of the 24 September ruling deserve attention beyond the headline. First, the court's reliance on Ritter's own conduct in the arbitration narrows her appellate options: a reviewing court asked to find that the arbitrator refused to hear material evidence will confront a trial-court finding that the evidence was not presented because directions were not followed. Second, the ruling arrives while Ritter's separate federal challenge to the same award is pending in the Central District of California, which raises a question of sequencing that the parties will now have to litigate in two forums at once.

How much was the Eric Schmidt arbitration award, and what does the record show?

Two figures circulate, and they are not inconsistent. The arbitrator's 29 April 2026 ruling — reported by the Associated Press and by multiple syndicating outlets — ordered Ritter to pay Schmidt $10.7 million in damages on his defamation claim, and the AP account expressly noted that the total was expected to increase once a final ruling issued. Law360's report of the 24 September hearing describes the award the court declined to disturb as $12 million. The likeliest reconciliation is that the later figure reflects a final award incorporating amounts left open in April, but the composition has not been published, and nothing in the public record breaks the $12 million down. Practitioners citing the case should cite the $10.7 million damages figure to the April ruling and the $12 million figure to the September reporting, and should not treat either as a verified total until the judgment is on the docket.

Date	Event	Forum	Figure
2021	Alleged assault aboard a yacht off Mexico, per Ritter's complaint	—	—
2023	Alleged non-consensual encounter at Burning Man, per Ritter's complaint	—	—
December 2024	Parties sign a settlement and arbitration agreement	Private contract	—
18 September 2025	Ritter files suit against Schmidt and related entities	LASC No. 25STCV26114	—
March 2026	Judge Michael Small grants the motion to compel arbitration; EFAA held inapplicable	LASC	—
29 April 2026	Arbitrator Beth Andrus (ret.) finds defamation; orders payment to Schmidt	Private arbitration	$10.7m damages
24 April 2026	Ritter files a parallel federal action challenging the award	C.D. Cal. No. 2:26-cv-04382	—
24 September 2026	Court declines to vacate the award	LASC	Reported as $12m

The claims behind those dates were unusually broad for a case that ended in a private award. Ritter's complaint alleged that Schmidt forcibly raped her aboard a yacht off the coast of Mexico in 2021 and had sex with her without consent at the 2023 Burning Man festival, and that he had described building an insider "backdoor" into Google servers with a team of engineers, which she alleged was used to access accounts including hers. She separately alleged that she was deprived of access to her workspace, emails and files, and that control of those accounts was transferred to others without authorization. The parties had co-founded Steel Perlot, an investment venture; Schmidt's counsel Patricia Glaser characterized the lawsuit as "fabricated pathetic allegations" advanced to "escape accountability from an existing arbitration over a business dispute," while Ritter said she had "been paid nothing" and was "being pressured to effectively pay a billionaire for taking my share of my own companies." None of that was adjudicated in public. The arbitrator's finding, as reported, was categorical: "I find that Ritter's statement that she was raped by Schmidt to be false," and that her "shameful false claims of sexual assault, advanced to extort and punish Schmidt, undermine and impair the pursuit of justice by legitimate victims."

Why didn't the EFAA keep the Eric Schmidt case out of arbitration?

Because the statute has a temporal trigger and this agreement fell on the wrong side of it. Section 402(a) of title 9 provides that, at the election of the person alleging conduct constituting a sexual harassment dispute or a sexual assault dispute, no predispute arbitration agreement or predispute joint-action waiver shall be valid or enforceable with respect to a case filed under federal, tribal or state law relating to that dispute. The operative adjective is "predispute." An agreement to arbitrate that the parties negotiate once a controversy exists is a post-dispute agreement, and § 402 says nothing about it.

Judge Small applied that reading directly. Because the settlement and arbitration clause came after the sexual assault disputes had already arisen, the 2022 statute could not be invoked to keep the case in open court. The March 2026 ruling therefore compelled arbitration of most of the dispute notwithstanding that the pleading alleged rape — an outcome that looks surprising against the run of EFAA decisions only if one forgets that almost every reported EFAA case involves an employment-onboarding arbitration agreement signed long before anything happened.

There is a second reason the EFAA had no purchase here, and it is worth naming because drafters will notice it. A settlement agreement is, by construction, post-dispute. When parties resolve a live controversy and embed an arbitration clause in the release, they are not imposing a contract of adhesion on an unsuspecting consumer or new hire; they are allocating the forum for a fight that already exists, usually with counsel on both sides. That is precisely the transaction Congress left untouched. Whatever one makes of the outcome in this case, the statutory line is clear, and it is a line about timing rather than about subject matter or bargaining power.

Does the EFAA apply to an arbitration agreement signed after a sexual assault dispute arises?

No. On the plain text, the EFAA reaches only a predispute arbitration agreement, so an agreement executed after the dispute has arisen is enforceable under ordinary Federal Arbitration Act principles even where the claims pleaded are sexual assault claims. The contested question in the case law is not whether post-dispute agreements are outside the statute — courts agree that they are — but when the dispute arose, because that is what determines which side of the line a given signature falls on.

The Eighth Circuit set the leading framework in Famuyide v. Chipotle Mexican Grill, No. 23-3201 (8th Cir. 2024), holding that when a dispute arises under the EFAA depends on the specific facts showing that a conflict or controversy exists between the parties, and reasoning that pre-litigation correspondence between counsel in February 2022 had not yet created one. The Missouri Court of Appeals for the Western District applied the same logic in the opposite direction on 11 August 2026 in State ex rel. Waddell v. Atkins, No. WD89050, granting mandamus and ordering a trial court to vacate an order compelling arbitration: the employee had signed the arbitration agreement on rehiring, after some of the alleged misconduct and after he reported it, yet the court held the agreement was still predispute because the parties were not adverse at signing and the controversy — the employer allegedly reneging on a commitment to keep him away from the former supervisor — had not yet crystallized.

Ritter v. Schmidt sits at the far end of that spectrum. There was no ambiguity about adversity in December 2024: the parties were negotiating a settlement of existing claims, which is the clearest possible evidence that a conflict or controversy existed. Set against Famuyide and Waddell, the case supplies the missing datapoint — the scenario in which the post-dispute characterization is not arguable.

Question	What the EFAA does	What it does not do
Which agreements does § 402(a) void?	Predispute arbitration agreements and predispute joint-action waivers	Agreements negotiated after the dispute arose, including settlement-agreement arbitration clauses
Who decides whether to invoke it?	The person alleging the sexual assault or sexual harassment conduct, by election	It is not self-executing; a respondent cannot invoke it, and it can be forgone
How much of the case is affected?	The case, not merely the sexual misconduct counts — see Doe v. Second Street Corp. (2024) 105 Cal.App.5th 552	It does not reach a case where no covered dispute is pleaded
When is the dispute deemed to arise?	When the facts show a conflict or controversy between the parties (Famuyide)	Reporting misconduct alone may not suffice (Waddell)

The scope point in the fourth column is worth holding onto, because it is the mirror image of what happened here. California's Court of Appeal held in Doe v. Second Street Corp. that the EFAA applies to the entire case rather than only the sexual assault or harassment claims within it, reasoning that Congress deliberately wrote "case" and not "claim" — a ruling that makes the EFAA extraordinarily powerful when it applies. Ritter v. Schmidt is the reminder that all of that power switches off if the agreement is post-dispute. The statute is close to absolute inside its trigger and entirely absent outside it, which puts enormous weight on a single contract date.

Can a court vacate an arbitration award because a party says it was not allowed to present evidence?

Only on a showing of substantial prejudice, and the bar is high. Under California Code of Civil Procedure § 1286.2(a), a court shall vacate an award where it was procured by corruption, fraud or other undue means; where there was corruption in any of the arbitrators; where the rights of a party were substantially prejudiced by misconduct of a neutral arbitrator; where the arbitrators exceeded their powers and the award cannot be corrected without affecting the merits; or where the rights of a party were substantially prejudiced by the arbitrators' refusal to postpone the hearing upon sufficient cause shown, by their refusal to hear evidence material to the controversy, or by other conduct contrary to the statute.

Ritter's public objection — that she was not allowed to provide evidence — is a § 1286.2(a)(5) argument. It is available in principle: California courts have set aside awards where an arbitrator's failure to hear material evidence substantially prejudiced a party. But subsection (a)(5) asks whether the arbitrator refused to receive evidence, not whether a party failed to put it in. A record showing that a party did not comply with the arbitrator's directions is fatal to the argument, because the causal chain runs the wrong way: the absence of the evidence is then attributable to the party, and the arbitrator's conduct is not the source of any prejudice. The 24 September ruling, as reported, rests on exactly that reading.

§ 1286.2(a) ground	What it requires	Fit with Ritter's stated objection
(1) Corruption, fraud or other undue means	Misconduct in procuring the award itself	Not asserted publicly
(2) Corruption in an arbitrator	Arbitrator corruption	Not asserted publicly
(3) Misconduct of a neutral arbitrator	Misconduct plus substantial prejudice	Adverse findings and sharp language are not misconduct
(4) Arbitrators exceeded their powers	Award outside the submission, uncorrectable	Defamation counterclaim appears to be within the agreement's scope
(5) Refusal to postpone or to hear material evidence	Refusal by the arbitrator plus substantial prejudice	The asserted ground — defeated where the party did not comply with the arbitrator's orders

Practitioners should note what is not on that list: error of law, error of fact, an award a reviewing judge considers excessive, and intemperate language in a reasoned award. A party who wants a merits appeal from an arbitration must contract for one before the arbitration begins.

The defamation counterclaim is the part respondents will study

The structural lesson of this case for the arbitration bar has less to do with the EFAA than with what Schmidt did once he was in the forum: he counterclaimed, and the counterclaim produced a money judgment against the claimant. That inverts the ordinary economics of a consumer or employment arbitration, where a respondent's realistic best case is a defense award and its exposure is one-directional.

The inversion is directly relevant to mass arbitration, where the entire claimant-side strategy depends on aggregate filing economics and where individual claimants are typically judgment-proof and effectively costless to recruit. A respondent that can plead a viable counterclaim against a subset of claimants changes the expected value of each demand for arbitration, and does so in a forum where there is no class mechanism to spread the risk and no public docket to shame the counterclaim. That is not a general license: counterclaims against consumers face fee-shifting limits, anti-SLAPP exposure in some states, provider rules on claim scope, and the effective vindication doctrine. It is, however, a live tactic that mass arbitration respondents have so far used sparingly, and the Eric Schmidt arbitration award will be cited to justify using it more.

The countervailing consideration is the one the arbitrator herself articulated: a finding that false assault allegations "undermine and impair the pursuit of justice by legitimate victims" cuts in both directions, because the same reasoning warns against a regime in which the risk of a defamation counterclaim deters genuine claimants from filing at all. That is the policy debate the EFAA was enacted into, and a post-dispute arbitration clause is the mechanism that keeps the debate out of public view.

What happens to Michelle Ritter's parallel federal lawsuit challenging the award?

It remains pending. Ritter filed Michelle Ritter v. Eric Schmidt et al., No. 2:26-cv-04382, in the Central District of California on 24 April 2026, challenging the arbitration award and asserting additional claims — a filing that is also how the April award became public. The state court's refusal to vacate does not by itself dispose of that action, but it materially complicates it: a state-court ruling declining vacatur, followed by entry of judgment on the award, raises preclusion and full-faith-and-credit questions that a federal court will have to address before reaching any independent review.

Jurisdictionally, the landscape shifted this year. In Jules v. Andre Balazs Properties, decided 14 May 2026, the Supreme Court held that a federal court retains jurisdiction over post-award motions where the underlying claims had been stayed under FAA § 3 — confirming that a federal court which sent a case to arbitration can later confirm or vacate the resulting award. That reasoning does not manufacture federal jurisdiction where the arbitration was ordered by a state court, which is the posture here, and it does not displace the ordinary rule that a federal petition to vacate needs an independent basis for jurisdiction. Ritter's federal action will therefore be tested first on jurisdiction and preclusion, not on the merits of her process complaints.

What it means for drafters, claimants' counsel and respondents

For drafters, the lesson of the Eric Schmidt arbitration award is narrow and practical: the execution date of an arbitration clause is a primary risk variable, not a formality. A clause in a standard-form contract signed at onboarding or account creation is a predispute arbitration agreement and is exposed to a § 402 election the moment a sexual assault or harassment allegation appears anywhere in a pleading. A clause negotiated into a settlement agreement, release or separation agreement after a controversy exists is not. Organizations that resolve individual allegations through settlement agreements should expect the arbitration clauses in those documents to be enforceable against later-filed claims arising from the same conduct, and should expect claimants' counsel to attack the timing — arguing, on Famuyide and Waddell lines, that the parties were not adverse when the document was signed.

For claimants' counsel, the case is a warning about the order of operations. Signing a settlement-and-arbitration agreement forfeits the EFAA for any dispute that had already arisen, and it does so permanently, because the election under § 402(a) operates only on predispute instruments. Counsel who intend to preserve a public forum must either decline the arbitration clause at settlement or scope it to exclude the conduct at issue. After the award, the realistic options shrink to the § 1286.2 grounds, and the record built during the arbitration — including compliance with the arbitrator's directions — determines whether any of them are available. A party who does not put evidence in cannot later say it was refused.

For mass arbitration respondents, two items go on the checklist. The first is the settlement-agreement arbitration clause as a forward-looking forum tool, particularly in programs that resolve individual claims one at a time. The second is the counterclaim, which this award demonstrates can convert a private proceeding from a cost center into an affirmative recovery, with the caveats above. For plaintiffs' firms running high-volume filings, the same fact pattern is a reason to tighten claimant vetting before a batch goes out the door.

Frequently asked questions

Did a court find that Eric Schmidt did not commit sexual assault?

No court made that finding. A private arbitrator, retired Washington State Judge Beth Andrus, found in a ruling reported as dated 29 April 2026 that Ritter's statement that she was raped by Schmidt was false and that she committed defamation. On 24 September 2026 a Los Angeles Superior Court judge declined to vacate the resulting award, which is a ruling about the integrity of the arbitration, not an independent adjudication of the allegations.

How much does Michelle Ritter owe?

The arbitrator's April 2026 ruling ordered $10.7 million in damages, and the Associated Press reported that the total was expected to increase in a final ruling. Law360 described the award the court declined to vacate on 24 September 2026 as $12 million. The composition of the higher figure has not been published.

Why did the EFAA not apply to a case alleging rape?

Because the EFAA voids only a predispute arbitration agreement. The parties signed their settlement and arbitration agreement in December 2024, after the alleged 2021 and 2023 incidents and after the disputes over them had arisen, so the agreement was a post-dispute instrument outside 9 U.S.C. § 402(a).

Can an arbitration clause in a settlement agreement be challenged under the EFAA?

Only by attacking the premise that the dispute had already arisen. Famuyide v. Chipotle Mexican Grill asks whether the facts show a conflict or controversy between the parties at signing, and State ex rel. Waddell v. Atkins shows a court finding an agreement predispute even though it was signed after the alleged misconduct was reported. Where the document settles existing claims, that argument is very difficult to make.

What are the grounds for vacating an arbitration award in California?

Section 1286.2(a) of the Code of Civil Procedure lists corruption, fraud or other undue means; corruption in an arbitrator; substantially prejudicial misconduct by a neutral arbitrator; the arbitrators exceeding their powers where the award cannot be corrected without affecting the merits; and substantial prejudice from a refusal to postpone the hearing on sufficient cause or a refusal to hear material evidence. Legal and factual error are not grounds.

Does this ruling change anything for mass arbitration?

Indirectly, in two ways. The Eric Schmidt arbitration award is not itself precedent — no arbitral award is — but it is being read for two propositions. It confirms that post-dispute arbitration clauses — including those in settlement agreements used to resolve individual claims within a larger program — are enforceable notwithstanding sexual misconduct allegations, and it supplies a high-profile example of a respondent recovering against a claimant by counterclaim inside arbitration, which changes the expected value calculation on the claimant side of high-volume filings.