A USC professor has avoided a possible default judgment in a lawsuit brought by a former doctoral student and research assistant who alleged he destroyed email and text message evidence in the case while contending he had been a victim of hacking.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Barbara A. Meiers ruled that the plaintiff’s attorneys can deal with the issue during the upcoming trial of the woman’s case against Professor David C. Kang.
“Plaintiff may inquire at length as to when or what was erased and to employ an expert if necessary, to examine Dr. Kang’s personal and work computers to gather information as to when computer purges comparable to that which is in issue occurred after the filing of plaintiff’s lawsuit and for two years before,” the judge wrote Tuesday.
The plaintiff can then ask for a hearing out of the presence of the jury and the judge will rule on what the jury can hear, Meiers said.
Kang acknowledged in a recently filed sworn declaration that the deletions should not have occurred.
“I deeply regret deleting any communications that are now the subject of plaintiff’s motion,” Kang says
The plaintiff in the Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit alleges Kang retaliated with unfair assessments of her graduate work when she objected to his alleged misconduct. In their court papers, her attorneys had asked the judge to impose terminating sanctions on Kang, which could set him on the path to a default judgment.
In redacted court papers, the plaintiff’s lawyers state that in response to discovery requests in October, Kang said the professor admitted he previously had a 30-day delete function on his cell phone that had deleted text messages the plaintiff believes were potentially relevant to the case.
Kang also admitted destroying emails from his personal Gmail and Proton Mail accounts, according to the plaintiff’s attorneys’ court papers.
“Whatever the reason, Kang’s deception has now been unveiled for what it is: an indefensible fraud on the court,” the plaintiff’s lawyers further state in their court papers. “Kang’s fraud is calculated and his subsequent hurried verifications under oath demonstrate Kang’s calculated evidence destruction is further compounded by his perjurious verifications.”
Kang has lied throughout the lawsuit and those lies, along with the alleged spoliation of evidence, have compromised “the very foundation of the action,” making terminating sanctions appropriate, the woman’s attorneys state in their pleadings.
The plaintiff’s lawyers further stated in their court papers that if the judge believed terminating sanctions were too severe, then other sanctions were appropriate, such as preventing him from telling a jury that he did not sexually assault, harass or discriminate against the woman.
But in his declaration, Kang says that even before he set his phone on auto-delete he was advised to do so by the USC IT department and the FBI because he was a target for hacking, including by perpetrators from a foreign government. Kang says he has frequently made public statements and written about national security related to the North Korean government.
The plaintiff names USC and Kang in the suit filed in August 2024. The woman alleges she was effectively terminated by Kang as his research assistant and he gave her a failing grade on her substantive paper for the qualifying exam — even though he previously stated it was satisfactory — because she refused to bow to his alleged sexual misconduct.
Kang, who like the plaintiff is Korean, was chairman of the plaintiff’s academic department and her dissertation adviser. According to the suit, he began grooming her by asking her to lunch in November 2021. Kang later hired the woman as a research assistant so he could directly supervise her, according to her complaint.
Kang sexually harassed the plaintiff by treating her in sexually stereotypical ways, including telling her that his children needed a mother, that the professor had trouble buying his daughter clothes or sanitary pads and also by asking the plaintiff to take his daughter shopping in South Korea, the suit states.
Trial of the case is scheduled March 30.