In 2020, Iris Kim, a 2019 Marshall graduate, accused former USC professor Choong Whan Park of sexually assaulting her multiple times. The following year, her Title IX complaint escalated into a lawsuit against Park, with USC also named as a defendant for discrimination against Kim. The case settled out of court in 2023.
Madhri Yehiya, who graduated with a master’s degree in journalism from USC Annenberg in May, began reporting on USC’s handling of a Title IX lawsuit against Marshall School of Business professor Choong Whan Park in January 2025. In April, after Yehiya reached out to the university for comment, USC filed a motion to destroy all “confidential” documents related to this case, she said. Yehiya’s story was published this week by LA Public Press, and Yehiya is now a reporter at Verite News in New Orleans.
“USC is to this day trying to hide [details about the case]. There’s a motion to destroy all the documents associated with this case just next week, on October 7, and that motion came about following the reporting of my article,” Yehiya said.
The motion filed by USC claims that Kim and her attorneys at the Garza Firm violated a Protective Order that was entered during the lawsuit.
After the case settled in 2023, Kim said in an essay that the Garza Firm gave her a binder and hard drive containing confidential USC documents, encouraging her to write “whatever she wants.”
However, USC claims in the legal documents that “the Protective Order requires that USC Confidential Materials be used only for purposes of the Kim Litigation.” In the motion, USC requests that Kim and the Garza Firm destroy all copies of USC’s confidential documents, as well as acknowledge in writing that they are bound by this protective order.
Yehiya confirmed to Annenberg Media that all documents used in her story were publicly available and obtained from the Los Angeles Superior Court.
“There was no activity with this case for years, and then once I reached out [to USC] for comment on this story, Iris Kim and her lawyers were contacted saying that they’d violated a confidential order … and it’s kind of kickstarted this effort on USC’s side to basically hide what happened in this story,” said Yehiya.
The documents revealed by Yehiya’s reporting included emails between Park, Title IX officials and Marshall School of Business Dean Geoffrey Garrett that “suggest[ed] the professor could retire early in exchange for a halt to the investigation.”
“If he is no longer employed, we can dismiss; I’m leaning that way,” emailed Catherine Spear, the former vice president of the Title IX office, according to the documents.
After Kim filed her lawsuit, Yehiya’s reporting claims that “Title IX officials seemed to change their minds” regarding an informal early retirement deal with Park. According to Yehiya’s article, “in an email to colleagues on May 12 2021, Park indicated he had been told the case would not be dropped after all, regardless of his retirement plans.”
The USC Office of Civil Rights Compliance said in a statement to Annenberg Media that “Dr. Park was not offered a retirement deal. The university followed its investigatory process for matters alleging harassment in this case.” That is the same statement Yehiya used in her story.
Yehiya says that while the university maintains there was no retirement deal made, the documents used in her article clearly point to what she calls an “informal” deal.
“There is, of course, a difference between a contractual deal and an informal deal, and what the emails definitely show is an informal deal,” says Yehiya.
Though Yehiya said she has no evidence to suggest that under-the-table negotiations are a repeated occurrence at the Title IX office, she said that “this happened once, and that should maybe give people pause of, ‘okay, what is going on at the Title IX office,’ right?”