Business
Created in California: How Barry's turned grueling military workouts into a sexy lifestyle
Arezu Aghaseyedjavadi signed up for her first Barry’s class in 2017, motivated to give the high-intensity workout a try after noticing how fit everyone seemed when she flew from San Francisco to Los Angeles for weekly work trips.
She lost 50 pounds in the first year and got hooked. More than 1,500 classes later, the venture capitalist, who now lives in Pasadena, pays about $500 a month for the boutique fitness chain’s top-level membership and has sweated it out at Barry’s around the world: all seven L.A.-area locations as well as studios in the Bay Area, San Diego, Austin, New York, Miami, Chicago, Boston, the United Kingdom, Dubai and Abu Dhabi — “I went there for 48 hours for a business meeting and I was like, ‘I want to get my Barry’s in,’” she said.
Aghaseyedjavadi was one of hundreds of Barry’s superfans who participated in a recent three-day bash to celebrate the brand’s 25th anniversary — a considerable milestone in the competitive, fad-of-the-moment world of health and fitness clubs, estimated to be a $98-billion global market.
Barry’s co-founder Barry Jay, right, and Chief Executive Joey Gonzalez in Hollywood in October.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
To mark the occasion, the company rented a Hollywood film studio and set up free cold-plunge baths, facial stations, a Lululemon pop-up and zero-gravity Therabody Lounger chairs. Employees handed out packets of Liquid I.V. hydration powder and samples of Mosh, a line of protein bars by Maria Shriver and her son Patrick Schwarzenegger. The kickoff party, DJ’d by Diplo and attended by *NSYNC’s Lance Bass, stretched into the next morning.
The main event was a series of huge 225-person workout classes, for which the company trucked in $1 million worth of Woodway treadmills, 2,200 dumbbells and resistance bands, and a custom audiovisual system to replicate the neon-red, pulsating nightclub aesthetic that has become a staple of the Barry’s experience.
An hourlong adrenaline-racing workout in a windowless room with hundreds of panting strangers spaced inches apart was unfathomable a few years ago, when gyms and fitness studios abruptly closed at the start of the pandemic. In the chaotic months that followed, many — overwhelmed by ever-changing government mandates and unable to lure back COVID-anxious clients who’d switched to virtual or outdoor exercise programs — never reopened.
Hundreds of Barry’s superfans attended a Hollywood party in October to celebrate the company’s 25th anniversary, a considerable milestone in the fad-of-the-moment world of fitness. After a challenging pandemic period, the company has been in rebuilding mode and today operates 84 studios in 14 countries.
(Presley Ann / Getty Images)
Founded in West Hollywood, Barry’s had become one of the most recognizable names in a crowded industry and was in the midst of an aggressive global expansion in early 2020. One hundred forty thousand people were attending a Barry’s class at least once a week, and the company planned to open 16 new locations by the end of the year, a 23% increase.
Instead, it halted operations at all 70 of its studios and laid off or furloughed two-thirds of its 1,300 employees.
“We were peaking — I call it the era of opulence,” Chief Executive Joey Gonzalez — ripped, toasty tan and typically tank-topped — said in a recent interview at Soho House Holloway. He started taking Barry’s classes in 2003 when he was an aspiring actor, became an instructor the following year and has led the company since 2015.
“Barry’s was so successful, we were firing on all cylinders, fitness in general had never been more top of mind for consumers,” he continued. “It was the most unnatural experience in life to go from generating over $100 million of revenue per annum to zero dollars.”
Big-box gyms, the Thighmaster and step aerobics dominated the American fitness landscape when personal trainer Barry Jay and two investor partners leased a small storefront at the corner of La Cienega Boulevard and Holloway Drive in 1998.
Jay didn’t have a military background — he’d previously worked as an instructor at Gold’s Gym — but called his new business Barry’s Bootcamp to highlight the hardcore nature of the workout, which he designed to be far tougher than the high-reps-with-light-weights body-sculpting classes that were popular at the time.
2006 photo of Barry Jay, center, leading a Barry’s Bootcamp workout in West Hollywood.
(Carlos Chavez / Los Angeles Times)
He leaned into the name: His studio was decked out in camouflage wallpaper and reinforced netting, and members were given numbered silver dog tags when they joined. During class, which cost $15 each and alternated between heart-pumping intervals on the treadmill and strength training with dumbbells on the floor, he would holler orders to sprint faster and lift heavier while pacing the darkened room in cargo shorts.
The punishment for being late was stair climbs or push-ups. Once, when Jay caught a client eyeing the clock, he got on a step stool and detached it from the wall.
“I said, ‘Hang on, Sandy, let me help you out. Why don’t you hold the clock while you run, and now you won’t have to worry what time it is,’” he recalled recently.
Barry’s co-founder Barry Jay, left, in 2014 with Joey Gonzalez, who started as a client and eventually became CEO. Gonzalez led a rebrand of Barry’s, phasing out the boot camp name and the intimidating military theme.
(Courtesy of Barry’s)
Jay, now retired and living in Las Vegas, had flown into L.A. to be a special guest at the 25th anniversary festivities. Sitting serenely on a treadmill before the start of the first 225-person workout, the company’s largest class ever (the average Barry’s class can fit about 50 people), he attributed some of his brash behavior back then to personal issues he was dealing with as he struggled to maintain his sobriety while teaching 40 times a week.
A 2006 Times profile detailed his problems with cocaine and other drugs, describing Jay as “an addict waiting to happen, with a more-is-more personality that made him do everything to the extreme … A few would leave class in tears.”
“I’m very soft now,” Jay, 60, said. “There was a lot of me that evolved with each and every year. But I will say it was all done in the spirit of the workout.”
Barry’s itself evolved, slowly phasing out the boot camp part of its name and the intimidating drill sergeant teaching style.
In its place, it pivoted to a workout-as-elite-lifestyle hook that helped launch the era of the modern boutique fitness studio. A class was no longer just a fat-burning sweat session — it was an all-encompassing, and expensive, health and wellness journey that became part of your identity.
Gonzalez was behind the glow-up. Still teaching Barry’s classes, he persuaded the company’s co-founders to let him invest his own money to open the company’s second location, in San Diego, in 2009.
With its red-lighted nightclub vibe and luxe amenities, Barry’s helped launch the era of the modern boutique fitness studio.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Two years later, he took out a second mortgage on his home to bring Barry’s to New York City, unveiling an upscale studio that would serve as the brand’s blueprint going forward: a sleek small-format space stocked with high-end bath products and other luxe amenities; top-of-the-line exercise equipment; a Fuel Bar selling pricey made-to-order protein shakes; and an army of absurdly hot instructors.
“It is inspirational and it is aspirational,” Gonzalez, 46, said of the rebranded Barry’s. “It just felt like the right thing to do. I think we were entering a new era where millennials don’t necessary respond to that type of punitive behavior.”
The hyper-curated vibe combined with the company’s 50-50 mix of cardio and lifting caught on among designer-athleisure-clad women, gay men and celebrities including Kim Kardashian and David Beckham. In 2019, a spandex-bodysuited Jennifer Lopez tried out to become a Barry’s instructor in an SNL skit (“How do you think you get this way? I haven’t had a carb since I was a baby!”).
Boutique brands hinge on cult status — for those who are there, they can’t imagine being anywhere else.
— Simeon Siegel, managing director at BMO Capital Markets
Rivals copied its high-energy format and feel, leading to an explosion of lookalike studios around the world selling their own take on premium high-intensity interval training (HIIT). There are now brands that combine rowing and weights, StairMaster and weights, climbing and weights, boxing and weights, spinning and weights, treadmill-rowing-and-weights, and so on, and major gym chains have introduced boot-camp-style workouts to their class schedules.
More than 3 million people have tried the Barry’s workout, a combination of treadmill intervals and strength training, since its founding in 1998.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Whichever studio you choose, it’s a near-guarantee that the playlists will be heavy on Britney and Beyoncé, the walls selfie-ready and cheeky-hashtag-adorned, the core customer base made up of die-hard fanatics reverse-lunging and dead-lifting in branded merch.
“Boutique brands hinge on cult status — for those who are there, they can’t imagine being anywhere else,” said Simeon Siegel, managing director at BMO Capital Markets. “People are proud to describe their experiences — they don’t just say they worked out; they tell you where they went.”
Despite the higher price point compared with traditional gyms — a single Barry’s class in L.A. now costs $34, and classes were shortened a few years ago to 50 minutes from an hour — “boutique fitness enthusiasts willingly pay a premium,” an October report by Research and Markets said.
“The boutique fitness industry is experiencing remarkable growth, with the global market projected to reach a staggering $79.66 billion by the end of 2029, as compared to $48 billion in 2022,” the data analysis firm said. It attributed the surge in popularity to factors including a sense of community, small class sizes and the trendy, meticulously cultivated atmosphere.
During the pandemic, many fitness operators simply unplugged their cardio machines, locked their doors and waited it out. Barry’s closed all of its Red Rooms in the U.S. on March 16, 2020, but Gonzalez wanted to find ways to keep the business going.
The next morning, he led a live full-body workout over Instagram that drew more than 20,000 participants, a precursor to the Barry’s At-Home virtual group classes that the chain would begin to offer a few weeks later. To help quarantined customers build their personal workout stations, and to make some money during the shutdown, Barry’s sold its branded weights, exercise benches, mats and resistance bands online.
Fitness really got the short end of the stick. There seemed to be support for so many different industries, but nothing for fitness.
— Joey Gonzalez, Barry’s CEO
Many iterations would follow: There was Barry’s X, an app-based workout for clients to do on their own. It debuted Barry’s Outdoors, its silent-disco strength classes held in parking lots, on rooftops and in the parking garage of the deserted Beverly Center; clients worked out in masks spaced six feet apart, wore wireless headphones to hear the instructors and had to wait in between rounds while employees sanitized each station. In New York, Barry’s reopened a couple of its studios as “open gyms” where people could work out on their own, with a remote instructor’s voice piped in through speakers.
When the company was finally given the green light to turn on its red lights again, it held indoor classes at 25% or 50% capacity.
“This was no fault of ours, so it was really challenging to process, internalize and problem-solve,” Gonzalez said of that strange time. “Fitness really got the short end of the stick. There seemed to be support for so many different industries, but nothing for fitness.”
Due to its size, Barry’s was not eligible for PPP loans. But it did receive incentives from Miami Mayor Francis Suarez and moved its headquarters to the city, where Gonzalez lives, in 2021.
Barry’s, with financial backing from private equity firms North Castle Partners and LightBay Capital, has been in rebuilding mode ever since the most stringent government restrictions were lifted. Today it has 84 studios in 14 countries, just shy of where it had planned to be at the end of 2020, and employs 1,400 people, its largest workforce to date.
The success of Barry’s led to an explosion of HIIT-based boutique fitness studios around the world. Their popularity stems from the combination of a sweat-dripping workout with a meticulously curated, aspirational aesthetic.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Its pace of expansion has been slower and more deliberate than that of franchise giants such as Orangetheory Fitness (more than 1,500 studios in 25 countries) and Xponential Fitness, a group that owns CycleBar, Row House and several other boutique brands. More than half of Barry’s studios are corporate-owned.
Revenue and attendance were up about one-third last year compared with 2022, the year Barry’s became profitable again. Roughly 20% of its clients take three or more classes a week, and 3 million people have tried the Barry’s workout since its inception. Just over half of its clients are 28 to 45 years old, about two-thirds of them female, the company said.
Now Barry’s is looking to double the size of its portfolio in the next five years, and making big investments in the L.A. market, where it already has a significant presence.
Next month Barry’s will close its original West Hollywood studio, a run-down outlier at more than a quarter-century old, and move into a gleaming 21,000-square-foot space a few blocks away. It’s bringing a concept called Ride X Lift to the new studio — the low-impact workout combines spinning and weights and is designed for people who dread the tread. There are also studios coming to Santa Monica, Studio City and Newport Beach in the first half of the year.
The pandemic led to a forced consolidation toward larger, well-capitalized fitness brands, but it’s still an extremely fragmented industry with a lot of players and high attrition rates, Siegel of BMO said.
“The best fitness products that are not winning on price are winning because of an emotional connection that is as strong as the physical one,” he said.
It has also become a more expensive business to run, so the pressure is on to get notoriously fickle customers in the door and convert them into fervent regulars like Aghaseyedjavadi.
“One time I did three classes in one day: a 6 a.m. and a 7 a.m., then I went to work, then there was traffic in L.A. so I was like, ‘Let me just go do a Barry’s at night,’” she said.
“It was the same instructor from the morning. He saw me and was like, ‘You’re back?’ I was like, ‘Should I do a fourth class?’ And he’s like, ‘No, please go home.’”
A Los Angeles jury dealt a blow to social media giants Meta and YouTube this week when it found that the platforms were negligent for designing addictive features that harmed the mental health of a California woman.
Both companies plan to appeal, but the ruling has ignited uncertainty around the tech companies’ future and sparked questions about the potential fallout.
The seven-week trial kicked off in February, featuring testimony from Meta and YouTube executives.
Kaley G.M., a 20-year-old Chico, Calif., woman, sued the platforms in 2023, alleging that using social media at a young age led to her mental health problems such as body dysmorphia and depression. She also sued TikTok and Santa Monica-based Snap and those companies settled ahead of the trial.
Lawyers representing the woman argued that the platforms hook in young users with features such as infinite scrolling, autoplaying videos and beauty filters.
People use social media to keep up with their friends and family, but teens can also feel inadequate, sad or anxious when they compare themselves to a curated version of other people’s lives online. They’re also spending a lot of time watching a seemingly endless amount of short videos.
A jury determined that Meta was 70% responsible for Kaley’s harms and YouTube was 30% responsible. They awarded her a total of $6 million. The ruling came shortly after a New Mexico jury found Meta liable for $375 million in damages after the state Atty. Gen. Raúl Torrez alleged the platform’s features enabled predators and pedophiles to exploit children.
“These verdicts mark an unsurprising breaking point. Negative sentiment toward social media has been building for years, and now it’s finally boiled over,” said Mike Proulx, a director at Forrester, a market research company.
How have the companies reacted to the verdict?
Meta and Google, which owns YouTube, said they disagreed with the ruling and plan to appeal.
“This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site,” said Jose Castañeda, a Google spokesman, in a statement.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone posted the company’s statement on social media site X.
“Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online,” the statement said.
Tech companies have been responding to mental health concerns, rolling out new parental controls so parents can keep track of their children’s screen time and moderating harmful content. Instagram and YouTube have versions of their apps meant for young people.
Some child advocacy groups and lawmakers, though, say these changes aren’t enough.
The ruling could affect how much money YouTube’s parent company, Alphabet, and Meta earn as they spend more on legal battles. While they make billions of dollars from advertising, investors are wary about higher expenses. The companies are already spending billions of dollars on artificial intelligence and developing new hardware such as smartglasses.
On Thursday, Meta’s stock fell more than 7% to $549 per share. Alphabet saw its share price drop more than 2% to roughly $280.
In 2025, Meta’s annual revenue grew 22% from the previous year to $200.97 billion.
Last year, YouTube’s annual revenue surpassed more than $60 billion. Both Google and Meta have been laying off workers as they spend more on AI.
The ongoing backlash hasn’t stopped tech companies from growing their users.
A majority of U.S. teens use YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey. More than 3.5 billion people use one of Meta’s products, which include Instagram and Facebook.
Social media has continued to change over the years as companies double down on short videos and AI chatbots.
Mental health concerns have only heightened as AI chatbots that respond to questions and generate content become more popular. Families have sued OpenAI, Character.AI and Google after their loved ones who used chatbots killed themselves.
Some analysts remain skeptical that Meta and YouTube would make drastic changes to their products because they’ve weathered crises before.
“Neither Meta nor YouTube is going to do anything different until a court orders them to, or there’s a significant drop in user or advertiser use,” said Max Willens, Principal Analyst at eMarketer.
Other analysts said legal risks could also affect how tech companies develop new AI-powered products and features.
“It’s likely that tech firms will now face increased scrutiny over the design of their platforms, which should drive more thoughtful inclusion of features that foster healthier interactions and safeguard mental health,” said Andrew Frank, an analyst with Gartner for Marketing Leaders.
At the very least, the verdicts serve as a “dire warning about how we handle the next wave of technology,” Proulx said.
“If we’re still struggling to put effective guardrails around social media after nearly two decades, we’re far from prepared for the growing harms of AI, which is moving faster, scaling wider, and embedding itself far deeper into people’s lives,” he said.
Times staff writer Sonja Sharp contributed to this report.
Justin Vineyards & Winery has agreed to workplace reforms and to pay $1.49 million to settle a federal lawsuit accusing it of allowing female employees to be sexually harassed and then retaliating against them for reporting it.
The Paso Robles business reached the settlement with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It was was approved Thursday by a federal judge.
Also named in the lawsuit and settlement is the Wonderful Co., the Los Angeles agribusiness owned by Beverly Hills billionaires Lynda and Stewart Resnick.
In 2010, Wonderful acquired Justin, which includes production facilities, a tasting room, inn and Michelin-starred restaurant.
The lawsuit, filed in 2022, alleged that female employees were subject since August 2017 to comments about their appearance; texts containing inappropriate photos; touching of their breasts, buttocks and genitals; forced kissing and other harassment by their male supervisors.
It further alleged that the companies “knew or should have known” about the hostile work environment.
The lawsuit also said that when complaints were made about the harassment, they were not properly investigated and the employees were subject to retaliation, including being given double shifts, being accused of wrongdoing and being berated and yelled at by supervisors.
Aside from the monetary penalty, the settlement requires Justin and Wonderful to halt any harassment or retaliation, undergo compliance audits and take other measures at the vineyard operations.
The companies denied all the allegations and agreed to the settlement to resolve the litigation, according to the consent decree.
In a statement, Justin said that the matter “dates back many years and was dealt with immediately and decisively the moment we became aware of any allegations of conduct that did not align with what is appropriate in the workplace.
“With this agreement reached, we look forward to putting this chapter fully behind us and continuing to focus on the incredibly talented team we have in place today,” the statement said.
Beatriz Andre, acting regional attorney for the EEOC’s Los Angeles District Office, commended Justin and Wonderful for reaching the settlement.
“The policy changes and reporting to which the companies agreed are important steps in ensuring a workplace free of discrimination,” she said in a statement.
In 2016, workers cut down dozens of oaks trees on land managed by Justin to make room for new grape plantings, stirring up controversy.
The Resnicks said they were unaware of the cutting, apologized, donated the land to a nature conservancy and agreed to plant thousands of trees on vineyard property.
After buying Justin, Wonderful acquired Landmark Vineyards in Sonoma County and Lewis Cellars in Napa Valley.
Business
Commentary: How a custody fight over an old dog showed why lawyers should never trust AI to tell the truth
The seemingly limitless proliferation of cases in which lawyers have been caught letting fictitious AI-generated legal citations contaminate their briefs continues to amaze.
That’s not only because judges are fining more lawyers for their laziness, but because the publicity about these embarrassments has been inescapable.
Here’s one involving a dog named Kyra.
She’s a 16-year-old Labrador retriever who became the target of a nasty custody fight between a California couple after the dissolution of their domestic partnership. In the course of the lawsuit, one lawyer published two AI-fabricated citations in a filing. The opposing law firm didn’t catch the flaw and cited the same fake cases in its filings, including in a court order signed by a judge.
Most lawyers grew up in a time when you could expect the other side to spin and even to lie about the record some of the time, but just lying or making a mistake about the existence of a case was basically unheard of up until a few years ago.
— Eugene Volokh, UCLA law school
The case of Joan Pablo Torres Campos vs. Leslie Ann Munoz also points to how AI, touted worldwide as a labor-saving technology, has actually increased the workload in some trades and professions, like lawyering. For litigators, it has created a new imperative: ferreting out citations that have been fabricated by AI bots in their own court filings — and their adversaries’.
I’ve written before about the proliferation of AI-generated fabrications infiltrating legal filings and even legal rulings, despite the advice drilled into the heads of even law students about making sure that their citations to precedential cases are accurate. But the wave keeps building: A database of AI hallucinations maintained by the French researcher Damien Charlotin now numbers 1,174 cases, of which some 750 are from U.S. courts.
That’s almost certainly a conservative count. Most AI fabrications may not even come to the attention of litigants or judges, especially in state courts.
“For every case that talks about this, my guess is that there are many that aren’t visible,” says Eugene Volokh of UCLA law school and the Hoover Institution, who keeps a weather eye on AI-related courthouse developments. He believes there may be thousands escaping notice.
AI has introduced mistakes that were never seen in the past. “Most lawyers grew up in a time when you could expect the other side to spin and even to lie about the record some of the time, but just lying or making a mistake about the existence of a case was basically unheard of up until a few years ago,” Volokh told me. “That’s because there would be no source of hallucinations — maybe you’d get the citations slightly wrong or you mischaracterized or misquoted them, but to talk about a case that doesn’t exist — that didn’t happen. Now it happens a lot.”
The judiciary is getting increasingly nervous about AI fabrications becoming part of the judicial record. “Reliance on fake cases…seriously undermines the integrity of the outcome and erodes public confidence in our judicial system,” an appelate judge stated.
Therefore, he added, “it is imperative for both the court and the parties to verify that the citations in all orders are genuine….This is especially vital with the increasing incidence of hallucinated case citations generated by AI tools.”
Judges are still reluctant to bring down the hammer for AI-fabrications if lawyers acknowledge their fault and “throw themselves on the mercy of the court,” Volokh says. But they’re getting tougher on lawyers who deny their reliance on AI or try to shift blame.
As recently as Monday, federal Magistrate Mark D. Clarke of Medford, Ore., ordered the attorneys representing the plaintiff in a civil lawsuit to pay more than $90,000 in legal fees, on top of an earlier sanction of $15,500 imposed on one of the lawyers, for incorporating 15 fabricated case citations and eight misquotations into case filings.
Clarke also dismissed the $29-million lawsuit, which arose from a ferocious dispute among the sibling heirs to an Oregon winery fortune, with prejudice, so it can’t be refiled. It was an extraordinary punishment, Clarke acknowledged — and the largest penalty imposed in any case in Charlotin’s database.
“In the quickly expanding universe of cases involving sanctions for the misuse of artificial intelligence, this case is a notorious outlier in both degree and volume,” Clarke wrote. Among other faults, he noted, the plaintiff’s lawyers never adequately fessed up to their wrongdoing. “If there was ever an ‘appropriate case’ to grant terminating sanctions for the misuse of artificial intelligence,” he wrote, “this is it.”
That brings us back to the custody battle over Kyra. The case originated in 2024, two years after a family court judge in San Diego dissolved the domestic partnership of Joan Torres Campos and Munoz. The dissolution order allowed them to keep their own property, but didn’t mention the dog, who lived with Munoz.
Torres Campos subsequently sought shared custody of Kyra and visitation rights. (Pet custody battles have long been a cultural fixture: Film aficionados might recognize this case’s similarity to the custody fight over the wire-haired terrier Mr. Smith in the 1937 Cary Grant/Irene Dunne vehicle “The Awful Truth,” surely the funniest movie ever made by Hollywood.)
Munoz rejected Torres Campos’ request, arguing that he didn’t really care about the dog, but only aimed to harass her. A family court judge sided with her, but Torres Campos appealed.
In her initial reply to Torres Campos, Munoz’s lawyer, Roxanne Chung Bonar, cited California cases from 1984 and 1995 that she said supported her client’s refusal to grant visitation rights.
Both case citations were fictitious. The 1984 case, Marriage of Twigg, didn’t exist at all; Bonar’s citation pointed to a criminal case that had “nothing to do with pets or custody determinations,” California Appellate Judge Martin N. Buchanan wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel, upholding the family court judge . The second reference was to Marriage of Teegarden, which was handed down in 1986, not 1995, and also had nothing to do with the issue at hand.
Things only got more complicated from there. Torres Campos’ lawyer, in a reply brief and a subsequent proposed court order, didn’t mention that Twigg and Teegarden were fabricated cases, perhaps because the lawyer hadn’t checked the references personally. The family court judge signed the proposed order, including the fake citations, resulting on their infiltration into the official record. (Although Torres Campos’ lawyer drafted the proposed order, it actually rejected his lawsuit.)
It was only in the course of appealing the family court ruling did Torres Campos’ lawyer mention that the two cited precedents were “invented case law.”
There was one more turn of the screw: In responding to Torres Campos’ appellate filing, Bonar “doubled down,” Buchanan wrote. Bonar insisted that Twigg was a “valid, published precedent” and added three more purported citations to the case. All were “just as phony as the original citation,” Buchanan noted.
Bonar even taunted Torres Campos’ lawyer for his “failure to conduct basic legal research” to verify the ostensibly genuine precedents, adding that his “inability to locate them underscores the incompetence that led to his appeal’s dismissal.”
Where did these references come from? It turned out that the Twigg reference originally came from a Reddit article written by an Oregon blogger and animal rescuer who posts under the name “Sassafras Patterdale,” in which she cited the fictitious case in a post about pet custody battles. Munoz had received the article from a friend and passed it on to Bonar. Both of them assumed that everything in it was accurate.
According to the appellate ruling, the additional citations to Twigg don’t appear in the Reddit post. Bonar never explained where they came from. She did concede, however, that the fictitious citations “‘may have’ come from her use of AI tools,” Buchanan noted. He sanctioned her with a $5,000 fine, largely because she did not initially acknowledge that her citations were fake and tried to shift blame to her opposing counsel.
Although the appeals judges could have awarded the case to Torres Campos due to Bonar’s performance, they declined to do so — because Torres Campos’ lawyers hadn’t checked their opposing counsel’s citations themselves. At this stage, Munoz still has custody of the dog and the lawsuit is essentially over, according to Torres Campos’ attorney, David C. Beavens of San Diego.
Beavens says he took the case because he hoped to use it to obtain judicial clarification of a state law enacted in 2019, which authorized courts to issue orders regarding the ownership and care of pets in divorce cases. The appellate judges, sidetracked by the AI issue, never touched on that. But Beavens says he agreed with the panel’s position AI fabrications have become such a problem in court that “we need to hold everyone accountable” — lawyers on both sides of a case and the judges as well.
Bonar told me that she was not challenging the sanction but declined to comment on it further.
I did ask Bonar if she had any advice for other lawyers tempted to use AI in their work. “Yes,” she said: “Verify all third-party sources.”
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