A popular mattress contains fiberglass. A Sacramento single mother is suing.
A Sacramento mother is suing a mattress company after she and her two children — one of them still an infant — were exposed to fiberglass. And with millions of Zinus mattresses sold in the U.S., Vanessa Gutierrez and her attorney are trying to raise awareness of these potential hazards.
Gutierrez said her younger daughter, Annalia, had watery eyes and a rash over much of her small body in the summer of 2019. Gutierrez spent about two and a half months stumped, repeatedly taking the infant to the doctor and thinking maybe Annalia had a mysterious allergy.
“The baby kept on getting sick, really itchy, kicking,” Gutierrez told The Bee. “Finally, one day, I noticed I had shiny crystals on my pants.” The crystals were tiny shards of fiberglass, and as she combed through her Natomas two-bedroom with a flashlight, she suddenly realized they were everywhere.
“I had no idea,” she said, “that could even happen from a mattress.”
Many consumers who buy Zinus products made with “sustainable materials” and “natural infusions like green tea, olive oil and charcoal,” her attorney said, may not know that their mattresses also contain a polymer mixed with glass fibers.
“This is something that just needs to be spread to the masses,” James Radcliffe said. “You literally cannot get these fibers out of your house by self-cleaning.”
According to the lawsuit filed in federal court in Sacramento, Gutierrez and her daughters suffered rashes, itchiness, sores, coughing, eye irritation and difficulty sleeping due to fiberglass that spread through the mattress cover, onto their bodies and throughout their home. Her older daughter, Alexis, has asthma, and Gutierrez said the then-9-year-old’s condition was irritated by the fiberglass, too.
Additionally, the single mother had to discard thousands of dollars worth of clothes, furniture, toys, linens and other household items because once the fiberglass was embedded in fabrics, it was essentially impossible to remove.
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, which reported the lawsuit last week, a Zinus spokesperson refuted Gutierrez’s story and the class action case as part of “a lawsuit and related misinformation campaign.” An attorney for the company did not immediately respond to The Bee’s request for a comment.
Gutierrez said she tried to resolve the matter without involving an attorney. As an analyst at the California Department of Public Health, she’s familiar with the workings of bureaucracy. She sent the company a huge spreadsheet of all the items she could no longer use to quantify her loss (she said she had to get rid of virtually everything that wasn’t made of metal, glass or hardwood); she repeatedly talked to Zinus representatives about the damage done.
But she said they kept saying she must have removed the zip-on mattress cover that is supposed to keep people safe from the fiberglass inside. She told them she never removed the cover — she had recently had a C-section and was still recovering from the major surgery, and she sometimes struggled to pick up her baby. She told them she physically couldn’t pick up a mattress and wrestle off the cover.
In the end, an email from Zinus sent just before Thanksgiving in 2019 shows the company offered her $1,000 as compensation. “Happy holidays,” the message concludes. She decided to sue them.
Exhibit A in the lawsuit is 20 pages of Amazon reviews warning others about the mattresses. One reviewer said that a tiny tear in the cover had led to “a TON of glass fibers” throughout their room, explaining that “a pin hole is enough to destroy your life.”
The fiberglass is ostensibly to make the mattress safer: Under federal law, all mattresses must meet certain flame resistance standards. Some companies comply by wrapping the mattress in, for example, fire-resistant cellulosic fiber, modacrylic fiber or silica-embedded rayon fiber. Zinus has opted to use a fiberglass sleeve to meet this standard. According to the lawsuit, the sleeves that do not contain glass “cost about five dollars more” on average.
Multiple online mattress retailers use the cheaper fiberglass cover, Radcliffe said, and some have criticized the use of this material in furniture for years. The complaint cites local news stories about fiberglass incidents in Arizona in 2017, Texas in 2020 and Missouri in January; multiple reports have been filed with the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission. The lawsuit says that Radcliffe’s firm, the Law Office of Christopher Cueto, represents over 2,000 people across the U.S. who have had similar incidents with fiberglass in their mattresses.
Radcliffe issued a warning: “You or someone you know has one of these mattresses.”
Gutierrez still has hers, too — locked in a storage unit along with all the items she lost, including Annalia’s baby bouncer, her onesies, her stuffed animals and baby blankets.
Gutierrez saved it all as evidence.
This story was originally published September 6, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of the agency where Gutierrez works. It is the California Department of Public Health.
