During the recuperation period, Mandrell was unable to work and therefore needed to collect on her insurance to pay for medical bills and to keep her band paid. On the “Ralph Emery on the Record” show, Mandrell explained that the problem was that under Tennessee law she had to go through the formality of filing a lawsuit against survivors of the dead driver who had caused the accident, 19-year-old college student Mark White, to collect from her own insurance company.[10]
She says she instructed her attorneys to call White’s family and tell them she wanted no money from them and was only doing what she had to do to get her own insurance company to pay for her medical costs, but most fans never knew about that or about Tennessee’s insurance law. They saw only the headlines about the lawsuit against the family who had lost a son. Before the case went to trial, she adds, her insurance company filed for bankruptcy. Her record and ticket sales fell off “in a big way,” Mandrell says.
“I’m not blaming the public,” she tells Emery, adding that given the information most of them got through the media, “I would have felt the way they felt.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Mandrell