Kendal Spencer was 23 and living in Vancouver when she visited the Hillsboro venue with friends on June 24, 2023. She was sitting on a couch in Bay 131 when a club apparently slipped from a man’s hands during a swing two bays away, according to her federal lawsuit.

Spencer was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where doctors used nine staples to close the wound. Her lawsuit said she was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and later experienced headaches, memory loss, vertigo, blurred vision and chronic pain. She had recently begun working as a teacher but could not continue because of her injuries, her lawyers said.

Spencer filed the negligence case in federal court in Portland in February 2025. She and her attorneys argued that Topgolf failed to protect customers by placing seating near hitting areas without barriers. They also alleged the company knew guests had been struck by objects entering seating areas at its facilities but did not adequately address or warn about the risk.

Topgolf’s attorney, Vicki M. Smith, argued in court that Spencer’s injury resulted from another customer accidentally releasing a club, rather than a hazard inherent to the facility. She described such incidents as rare. Smith did not respond to a request for comment on the settlement.

The settlement is the second multimillion-dollar result secured against Topgolf by Portland law firm Smith Foster King in about a year. In September 2025, a federal jury found Topgolf negligent in the case of a 9-year-old boy who was hit in the head by a golf club at the Hillsboro location and awarded his family $16 million. The boy suffered a fractured skull and brain injury, underwent surgery and received three titanium plates in his skull.

Trial testimony in that case included an analysis of Topgolf’s Hillsboro site and a location in Roseville, California. It found 27 reported injuries from golf-club strikes at the two venues between 2019 and 2021, most involving the head or face, and many involving children.

“These cases involve remarkably similar allegations,” said Sam Smith, a partner at the law firm. He said the clients contend the same hazard caused preventable injuries and expressed hope that attention to the cases would lead to improvements in guest safety.

In the earlier case, Topgolf’s lawyers pointed to floor markings separating hitting bays and signs and audio announcements directing customers to stay behind a red line. Spencer’s case ended in a settlement rather than a jury verdict, and no settlement amount was made public.