USC sues YouTubers over pranks

The College of Southern California is suing two YouTube performers who the college says created panic after barging into lecture rooms to movie prank movies for his or her channels.

Courtroom paperwork obtained by the Los Angeles Occasions 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, should not USC college students. They may not be reached for remark Monday, and it was unclear whether or not they have attorneys who might communicate on their behalf.

A decide on Friday issued a brief restraining order banning the pair from USC’s 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 Warfare II, in response to court docket paperwork.

College students ran from the classroom — in some instances tripping over seats and abandoning laptops and backpacks — in an try and flee “what fairly appeared to them as a reputable risk 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 concern and emotional misery.

In September, Kanevsky, Bai and an affiliate entered an information 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 conduct,” court docket paperwork say.

Along with the restraining order, the swimsuit 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 Occasions reported. The channel options prank movies at universities, in gyms and eating places, on the seaside and in different areas.