$60 Million Judgment for Three Taekwondo Athletes Abused by Coach Marc Gitelman
Won by Estey & Bomberger.
A Los Angeles judge awarded $60 million to three female taekwondo athletes who were sexually abused by their coach for seven years, a case that later prompted the California Supreme Court to hold that national sports governing bodies owe a legal duty to protect athletes from abuse.
What happened
Yazmin Brown, Kendra Gatt, and Brianna Bordon began training in competitive taekwondo as teenagers under coach Marc Gitelman, a top-ranked Las Vegas instructor known as 'Master G.' From 2007 through 2014, Gitelman abused each of them during competition travel, providing alcohol to the minors in hotel rooms and assaulting them at dorms inside Olympic Training Center facilities. The abuse continued over years while Gitelman maintained his standing as an elite coach within the national governing structure of the sport.
Estey and Bomberger filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court in 2015, naming Gitelman, USA Taekwondo, and the U.S. Olympic Committee as defendants. Gitelman had by then been convicted of related crimes and was serving a prison sentence. After he failed to respond adequately to the civil lawsuit, the court entered him in default.
In August 2017, the Los Angeles Superior Court awarded the three women $60 million. Steve Estey, who argued on their behalf, noted publicly that competition events continued to trigger trauma responses in the survivors years after the abuse ended. One plaintiff had come within reach of qualifying for the 2016 Rio Olympics before her career was derailed.
The trial court dismissed the claims against USA Taekwondo and the USOC. Estey and Bomberger appealed. The case reached the California Supreme Court, which issued a unanimous decision in April 2021, holding that sports organizations governing youth activities have an affirmative legal duty to protect athletes from sexual and other abuse. The court revived the negligence claims against USA Taekwondo after finding the organization had a 'special relationship' with both Gitelman and the athletes he coached. Claims against the USOC were not reinstated, the court finding insufficient organizational proximity to give rise to the same duty.
Because Gitelman has no meaningful assets, recovery of the $60 million from him was not expected. The 2021 Supreme Court ruling, however, opened the path to holding the national governing body accountable and established precedent affecting all 61 national governing bodies overseeing Olympic sports in California.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.CBS News / AP: 3 taekwondo athletes awarded $60M in sex case vs. coach Marc Gitelman (Aug 2017)·Archived copy
- 2.Sports Illustrated / AP: Taekwondo athletes win $60 million in sex case against coach (Aug 2017)·Archived copy
- 3.ESPN / AP: California Supreme Court says USA Taekwondo must protect athletes (Apr 2021)·Archived copy
- 4.Fox News / AP: Taekwondo athletes win $60 million in sex case against coach (Aug 2017)·Archived copy
- 5.FindLaw: Brown v. USA Taekwondo, California Supreme Court opinion, S259216 (Apr 1, 2021)
More proven verdicts from Estey & Bomberger
All Estey & Bomberger proven verdicts →Ohio State University agreed to pay $100 million to 279 of 280 remaining plaintiffs who sued the university over decades of sexual abuse by former team physician Dr. Richard Strauss; Estey and Bomberger was among co-counsel firms representing survivors.
A Santa Clara County jury awarded $30 million to a man who endured years of sexual abuse as a foster child, finding the Giarretto Institute 75 percent responsible for licensing and failing to monitor the Mountain View home where the abuse occurred.
A Los Angeles jury awarded $23 million in December 2012 after finding that LAUSD ignored repeated warning signs while a fifth-grade teacher molested a ten-year-old student dozens of times over the course of a school year.
A Southern California hospital agreed to the largest medical malpractice settlement in California history after a NICU nursing error with a feeding machine caused glucose overload and permanent brain damage in a five-week-premature newborn.
Related wrongful death verdicts
In December 2011, a Fayette County, Texas jury awarded the family of an 8-year-old Splendora boy $150.37 billion after he was doused with gasoline and set on fire by a 13-year-old neighbor in 1998, two weeks after the same neighbor sexually assaulted him. The boy survived third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body for nearly 13 years before dying in April 2011 of a skin cancer linked to his injuries. The defendant, Don Wilburn Collins, never appeared to answer the civil suit, and the jury awarded $370 million in actual damages plus roughly $150 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family, said from the outset that the judgment was not collectible and was intended to pressure prosecutors into reopening the long-dormant criminal case. Prosecutors did reopen the case, and Collins was later convicted of capital murder in a separate criminal proceeding.
A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
Frantz Law Group, representing roughly 5,000 victims, helped negotiate a $13.5 billion PG&E bankruptcy settlement covering tens of thousands of survivors and families from the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp wildfires.