Topgolf Pays Multi-Millions After Flying Golf Club Gave Woman a Brain Injury

TL;DR: A flying golf club cost Topgolf another multi-million-dollar payout. The company settled with an Oregon woman who suffered a traumatic brain injury at the Hillsboro venue in June 2023, when a club came out of a golfer’s hands two bays away and hit her in the back of the head. Her lawyers announced the settlement on October 19, keeping the amount private. It is the same firm’s second win over the same venue, and a third case in Colorado is still open.

This is not a story about golf as a sport. It is about the business model underneath what a Topgolf actually costs to build and what happens when the entertainment venue’s design becomes the hazard. On June 24, 2023, a then-23-year-old woman was sitting on a couch near her group’s bay at the Hillsboro location, about 15 miles northwest of Portland. Someone in a group two bays away swung, the club came out of the person’s hands, and it hit her in the back of the head. The lawsuit says she slumped into her friend’s lap with blood pouring from a large wound. An ambulance took her to the ER, doctors put nine staples in her scalp, and a CT scan confirmed a traumatic brain injury.

What did the injury cost her?

A career, at 23. She had gone to Topgolf to celebrate a new teaching job. The lawsuit says she can no longer teach: she now lives with headaches, vertigo, memory loss, mood swings, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, sleep problems and chronic pain. She is 26 and works as a housecleaner. One detail from her complaint did heavy work in the case: she did not sign a liability waiver when she visited the location, nor was she asked to. The lawsuit also alleged that Topgolf had placed seating areas near active hitting bays without protective barriers, and pointed to the company’s own signs warning of “errant golf balls or clubs” as evidence it knew the hazard existed. Topgolf denied the allegations, admitted no liability, and did not respond to USA Today’s request for comment on Thursday.

How many times has this happened at Hillsboro?

Enough to form a pattern, which is the plaintiff’s whole point. This is the second successful lawsuit the Portland firm Smith Foster King has won over an incident at the same venue. The first involved a 9-year-old boy who suffered a skull fracture and traumatic brain injury in November 2021 when a club hit him. Golfweek, citing Oregonlive, reports that a federal jury in Portland found the venue negligent in September 2025 and put the judgment at $16 million; the boy needed surgery and ended up with titanium plates in his head. The new settlement started at a $40 million opening ask plus punitive damages and ended at an undisclosed multi-million figure. Then there is the Colorado case: Crystal Robertson, 45, who allegedly suffered a traumatic brain injury at the Thornton venue on March 13 and needed five staples above her left eye. The firm says it is still trying to obtain video of that one. “When the same injury keeps happening at the same company, under strikingly similar circumstances, it is not an isolated accident,” partner Anne Foster said in a statement.

Why do the venue’s own signs matter so much?

Because warnings are evidence. The lawsuit’s most quoted detail may end up being the signage: Topgolf posts warnings about “errant golf balls or clubs,” and the plaintiff’s lawyers argued that meant the company knew customers were at risk before June 2023. Golf’s hazards are supposed to be the wind, the water, the rough — St Andrews’ wind once blew a missed putt back into the hole — but those are acts of nature, not design choices. A seating plan that puts couches within club-flying distance of active bays, with no barriers and no signed waiver, is a choice. Topgolf denied the allegations and admitted nothing, but the signs are now exhibits in a growing file.

How does this sit with golf’s own culture?

Uneasily. Professional golf still runs on players policing themselves — McCumber called a two-shot penalty on himself this season that the cameras could not even prove. The entertainment offshoot runs on the opposite principle: documented hazards, foreseeable injuries, and liability. Nobody at the Hillsboro venue was accused of cheating. The accusation is simpler and harder to answer: the company knew clubs leave hands, posted signs saying so, and kept the couches where the clubs could reach them.

What happens next?

The Colorado case is the one to watch. Robertson’s lawsuit is the same allegations in a different state, and the firm is actively seeking the surveillance video it used to such effect in the Hillsboro cases. Topgolf has declined to comment on the settlement, and it has not announced any design changes at its venues. Lawsuits like the Gibbs-Spire trade-secrets fight move slowly through courts, and venue-liability cases tend to settle quietly rather than produce verdicts. But two multi-million payouts over the same venue hazard in the same metro area, plus a third case pending, is no longer quiet. The company’s own warning signs are now exhibits in a growing file.