A panel of Fourth District Court of Appeals justices Friday upheld nearly all of the convictions against a well-known Orange County water polo coach convicted of sexually assaulting nine girls he coached.
Bahram Hojreh, 49, was sentenced in January 2023 to 18 years and four months in prison. The justices remanded sentencing back to Orange County Superior Court Judge Kimberly Menninger as one of the convictions was thrown out.
It is possible Menninger may hand down the same sentence, since she ran the dismissed count concurrently. The justices dismissed one conviction for sexual penetration because the victim said she could not recall that detail when he was molesting her during a training session.
The justices also ruled that Menninger made the right calls in pretrial rulings about how some evidence in the trial was admitted, including that one of the girls had been accused of assault herself against an opposing player and that another coach had pleaded guilty to having a sexual relationship with one of the girls.
Hojreh was convicted in November 2022 of 22 felony counts, including lewd or lascivious acts on a minor under 14, lewd acts on a child 14 or 15, sexual penetration by a foreign object of a minor and sexual battery by fraud for attacks on nine victims. He was acquitted of sexually assaulting a 10th girl, but jurors convicted him of misdemeanor counts of simple assault in her case.
Hojreh coached the teens on the International Water Polo team at the Joint Forces Training Base pool in Los Alamitos, where the girls said he touched them inappropriately during training. Some of the conduct also took place at Kennedy High School in La Palma, prosecutors said.