LOS ANGELES — The College of Southern California is suing two YouTube performers who the varsity says created panic after barging into lecture rooms to movie prank movies for his or her channels.
Courtroom paperwork obtained by the Los Angeles Instances declare the pair precipitated “terror and disruption” throughout three “classroom takeover incidents” within the college’s Mark Taper Corridor of Humanities.
The YouTubers, Ernest Kanevsky and Yuguo Bai, are usually not USC college students. They might not be reached for remark Monday, and it was unclear whether or not they have attorneys who may converse on their behalf.
A choose on Friday issued a short lived restraining order banning the pair from USC’s downtown Los Angeles campus.
Within the newest incident, on March 29, Kanevsky and Bai interrupted a lecture on the Holocaust whereas pretending to be “a member of the Russian Mafia” and Hugo Boss, a identified producer of Nazi uniforms throughout World Battle II, in accordance with court docket paperwork.
College students ran from the classroom — in some circumstances tripping over seats and abandoning laptops and backpacks — in an try and flee “what fairly appeared to them as a reputable menace of imminent classroom violence,” the court docket submitting says.
The college’s legal professionals stated the pair’s conduct “quantities to each a private and non-private nuisance” that precipitated college students to expertise worry and emotional misery.
In September, Kanevsky, Bai and an affiliate entered a knowledge science lecture and allegedly used bodily intimidation to pressure the professor out of the classroom earlier than taking up the lectern and subjecting the scholars to “insults and demeaning habits,” court docket paperwork say.
Along with the restraining order, the go well with seeks unspecified compensatory damages, together with attorneys’ charges and different associated prices.
Kanevsy’s YouTube channel has greater than 111,000 subscribers and his movies have obtained greater than 8.3 million views, the Instances reported. The channel options prank movies at universities, in gyms and eating places, on the seashore and in different places.