In a tentative ruling, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge rejected USC lawyers’ request to destroy records in a 2021 sexual assault case involving a retired professor.
Superior Court Judge Dean J. Kitchens was scheduled to hear the case on October 7, which was cancelled on Monday afternoon by USC lawyers.
The case involved a 2021 sexual assault and discrimination lawsuit filed by Iris Kim, a 2019 graduate of the Marshall School of Business. She accused former professor Choong Whan Park of repeatedly sexually assaulting her and sued USC for discrimination.
The two sides reached an out-of-court settlement in 2023 for an undisclosed amount of money.
The Title IX complaint caught the eye of a USC Annenberg graduate student last spring, who began looking into it as part of an investigative project. When the student, Madhri Yehiya, reached out to the university with questions, USC filed a motion to destroy all “confidential” documents related to this case. They argued that the former student and her attorney, Sharyl Garza, had violated a protective order requiring “that USC Confidential Materials be used only for the purposes of the Kim litigation.”
In an interview last week, Yehiya said that “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.”
Los Angeles Public Press published Yehiya’s story on September 29. The Garza Firm included the story in a request for judicial notice in the hopes that Yehiya’s reporting would be included in the court proceedings.
Despite the article being based entirely on records that Yehiya found in publicly accessible court files at L.A. Superior Court, “USC falsely claimed that the plaintiff provided ‘confidential’ documents to a reporter,” according to the Garza firm’s response to the motion.
Last Friday, USC filed an objection claiming that “[Kim] and her counsel continue to chomp at the bit to spread documents about this case far and wide,” they wrote. “As they did here, they will take any opportunity to push out or publish documents about USC. That is why the Protective Order was important to USC in the first place. It remains just as important today.”
But by Monday, after the release of the judge’s tentative ruling, they appeared to change their mind and withdrew their motion to destroy the documents just before 5 p.m.
“We believe that USC’s motion was meritless, was based on false allegations and was being brought for an improper purpose,” said Sharyl Garza in a statement to Annenberg Media. Garza also added that she preferred to only issue a statement and declined an interview as a precaution due to “USC’s propensity to assert false allegations against our firm and our client, a victim of sexual harassment.”
When asked why the university filed its withdrawal, USC responded in a statement that “the protective order remains in place. The court continues to have jurisdiction if there is a breach of that order.”
The motion claimed that Kim did not have a right to use the case documents for media purposes, citing an essay she wrote about her experience in the legal system in which she claims the Garza Firm gave her a binder and hard drive containing confidential USC documents, encouraging her to write “whatever she wants.”
Kim hints at future plans to write more about the case, saying “someday, maybe, I may stop writing about what happened to me. But until that day, I will write, and write, and write, because there is no one stopping me now.”