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The University of Southern California has sued two men who allegedly barged into classrooms to film prank videos for their personal YouTube channels, causing “terror and disruption,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
On three occasions, Ernest Kanevsky and Yuguo Bai—who are not USC students—stormed classrooms in a humanities building, interrupting lectures and in at least one instance subjecting students to “insults and demeaning behavior,” according to the lawsuit. On Friday, a judge issued a temporary restraining order, barring both men from the USC campus.
Most recently, according to court documents, Kanevsky and Bai disrupted a March 29 lecture on the Holocaust, impersonating “a member of the Russian Mafia” and fashion designer Hugo Boss, who manufactured Nazi uniforms during World War II. Students panicked, knocking over chairs and abandoning their belongings in an effort to flee “what reasonably appeared to them as a credible threat of imminent classroom violence,” according to the lawsuit.
Following the incident, Los Angeles police arrested the two men.
In earlier incidents, the two men had help from accomplices. In one case, Kanevsky, Bai and a third man allegedly forced a professor out of the classroom, then stood at the lectern hurling insults at students. On another occasion, they barged into a classroom dressed as characters from the TV show Squid Game, staging a fake kidnapping with the help of two other men.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified compensatory damages, along with attorneys’ fees and other costs. The temporary restraining order also prohibits the men from posting videos of the incidents on YouTube.
“The court’s order granting a temporary restraining order underscores the need to provide a sense of stability and comfort in an in-person learning environment and in light of campus safety concerns nationally on college campuses,” university officials wrote in a statement Monday. “The court ruling should be viewed as a warning that such behavior won’t be tolerated by these or any other individuals.”
