Editor’s Note: Law Week Colorado edits court opinion summaries for style and, when necessary, length.
People v. Choi
In October 2022, Yujin Choi intentionally acted to harm a coworker by fabricating text messages designed to make it appear that the coworker was harassing her. She doubled down on that deceit during her employer’s investigation into the messages by intentionally altering evidence.
To maintain the ruse, she purposefully ruined her own phone and laptop to prevent her employer from forensically examining the devices, spinning a false narrative about their accidental destruction.
The hearing board concluded that Choi engaged in two intentional acts of dishonesty, as pleaded. It found that Choi fabricated four text messages.
According to the opinion, Choi’s dissemination of these texts demonstrated her intent to deceive her coworkers, supervisors and her employer, the Denver District Attorney’s Office, in general. When she affirmatively showed or described these forged messages to her coworkers, Choi perpetrated a false and harmful narrative that a coworker had sexually harassed her by sending these messages.
The board also found that Choi intended to act dishonestly when she sent someone from the office, who was investigating the alleged harassment, the Verizon message log she downloaded and altered to misleadingly frame the coworker as the author of a text.
In addition, the board found that Choi had intentionally created a false impression that her devices had been accidentally ruined. On Oct. 21, 2022, Choi volunteered to bring her computer and phone to the DA’s office for extraction the following week. But, during the weekend of Oct. 22, 2022, both devices were destroyed by water damage in two separate but related and consecutive incidents. Choi portrayed the damage as accidental, but the board didn’t find her narrative plausible.
The board also concluded that the victim of the counterfeit texts suffered, at a minimum, reputational and emotional harm. He offered unrefuted testimony that he experienced personal and professional turmoil as a result of Choi’s fabricated messages. According to the opinion, Choi not only knew she was creating false messages but did so with the conscious objective to malign her coworker. While it couldn’t determine by clear and convincing evidence why Choi was motivated to fabricate the texts, the board was certain that she acted intentionally to besmirch the coworker’s reputation.
The PDJ ordered Choi disbarred, effective Dec. 31, 2024.