A judge indicated Tuesday he is poised to allow a former USC business student to take to trial her negligence lawsuit alleging who she was severely injured performing a trapeze exercise while obese in 2023 as part of an elective class, but there was no final ruling.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Steven A. Ellis took plaintiff Jill Johnson’s case under submission. The suit names as defendants USC, marketing professor Joseph Priester and the Santa Monica Trapeze School LLC. At the time of the accident, Johnson was 33 years old and weighed about 340 pounds.
The defense attorneys argued there were no triable issues and cited the defense of assumption of the risk. But in his tentative ruling, the judge said Johnson went to school to get an MBA, not a trapeze lesson.
“In signing up for this course, plaintiff had no reason to believe that she would be at risk of an injury in a trapeze lesson,” the judge wrote. “She did not assume that risk. And by the time that she learned that one of the activities in the course was a trapeze lesson, it was too late for her to drop the course.”
According to the suit filed in October 2023, while a student at the USC Marshall School of Business, working to obtain an MBA, Johnson was required to take a number of elective units and decided to enrolled in the “Fostering Creativity” course taught by Priester.
The goal of the trapeze lesson was to help students find their edge and overcome their fears, the suit states.
Johnson told the professor she was concerned about the school’s weight limit and whether she would be able to participate, but he replied, “You are in great shape, and the weight will not be an issue,” the suit states.
Priester knew that Johnson exceeded the 205-pound weight limit, but still encouraged her to participate, the suit states.
USC owed Johnson an obligation to not expose her to unnecessary risk and to supervise and approve the curriculum of its professors, but she suffered severe physical and emotional injuries, incurred medical costs and experienced past and future lost earnings, the suit alleges.
In a sworn declaration, Johnson said she looked at her left leg at the hospital and it was “completely dislocated, so it’s kind of spaghetti-like, flopped, and they tried to, like, set it back in place and it just fell back over again and I started crying.”
Asked if the professor required students to take the trapeze lesson, Johnson replied, “He did not use the exact language of `required.’ But he did not provide any alternative.”
USC lawyers contend that Johnson “assumed the risks inherent in the trapeze activity by her mere participation in the activity and there is no evidence that defendants increased the risks inherent to exercise.”
The defense attorneys also contend that Johnson signed a participation agreement, release and assumption of the risk document provided her by the trapeze school.