$900 Million Verdict, Cut to $90 Million by the Trial Judge, for an Employee Raped by the Owner of FilmOn and Hologram USA

The plaintiff, identified in court as Jane Doe, went to work in February 2016 for the companies of Alkiviades David, the Coca-Cola bottling heir who ran FilmOn TV in Beverly Hills, Hologram USA and SwissX Labs and had spent years describing himself as a billionaire. She stayed until April 2019. According to the evidence at trial, over those three years David subjected her to a pattern of sexual harassment that ended in rape. Her lawyers told the jury that employees referred to one office at Hologram USA as the rape room, and that a pornographic image labeled with a crude pun hung on the door of the human resources department.

The timing of the assaults became part of the case. In April 2019 David was already on trial in a separate sexual assault suit brought by a former employee, Chasity Jones, which ended that month in an $11 million verdict. The plaintiff's lawyers presented evidence that David assaulted her while that trial was underway. Two other juries had already found against him: Mahim Khan won $8.25 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages, and Elizabeth Taylor, a former account executive, won $8.38 million. By the time this case reached a jury it was the fifth verdict against David and his companies for workplace sexual misconduct in five years.

She filed suit in September 2020. David's liability for rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment and retaliation was established before trial, so the jury that was impaneled in June 2024 in Department 76 of the Los Angeles Superior Court, before Judge Christopher L. Lui, decided only damages. David did not defend the trial. His own former attorney later told the Daily Beast that the case was not actively defended and that the defense table was empty; David himself, reached in Greece, claimed he had never been invited and disputed that a jury had reached any verdict at all.

Gary A. Dordick of Dordick Law Corporation tried the case with associate Dustin Moaven as second chair. On June 17, 2024, the jury returned a unanimous verdict of $900 million against David for sexual battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress: $100 million in compensatory damages and $800 million in punitive damages. The Daily Journal reported it as one of the largest sexual assault verdicts in history. Moaven acknowledged in the days after the verdict that collecting would be difficult and that the larger goal for the plaintiff had been validation.

David moved to set aside the verdict. In September 2024 the trial court ruled that the award shocked the conscience. The judge found the plaintiff's testimony credible and called the rape an obviously heinous act causing physical and emotional injuries, but held that $100 million in noneconomic damages was excessive. Because punitive damages had not been bifurcated, the jury had heard evidence of David's net worth, of the earlier multimillion-dollar verdicts against him, and of his public ridicule of those plaintiffs before it set compensatory damages, and the court concluded that evidence had likely inflamed the compensatory number. The court ordered a new trial on damages unless the plaintiff accepted $90 million: $10 million in compensatory damages and $80 million in punitive damages, preserving the jury's eight-to-one ratio.

David filed a notice of appeal at the end of September 2024. He has said in interviews that none of the plaintiffs who have won verdicts against him have received a penny and never will. Public reporting since then has not resolved whether the plaintiff accepted the reduced award, how the appeal has proceeded, or whether any of the $90 million has been paid. The number that stands on the record is the trial court's $90 million, and it remains contested.