YouTubers Sued by USC After Posing as Russian Mafia for ‘Classroom Takeover’ Prank That Terrified Students

Two YouTube pranksters are dealing with the consequences of some of their attempted pranks—as USC is suing them and claiming that they’ve caused “terror and disruption” on campus, per court documents seen by the Los Angeles Times.

The two non-students, Ernest Kanevsky and Yuguo Bai, led three “classroom takeover incidents” in the Mark Taper Hall of Humanities, with the most recent being on March 29. During that incident, the two men interrupted a Holocaust lecture dressed as “a member of the Russian Mafia” and Nazi uniform manufacturer Hugo Boss, causing students to flee the classroom fearing “what reasonably appeared to them as a credible threat of imminent classroom violence,” per the documents. 

The two men were then arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department and have been left with a temporary restraining order from campus via a decision by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge. TMZ reports that Kanevsky and Bai were arrested at gunpoint in a parking lot. 

School attorneys claim that their actions “caused [USC] students to experience emotional distress and genuine fear for their personal well-being, and has resulted in ongoing concern among community members regarding overall safety” on campus, per the Times. 

And as pointed out in documents, this wasn’t their first classroom disruption. In September, the men were joined by an associate when they allegedly physically intimidated a professor before taking over a lecture and insulting students. Two months later, they dressed up as Squid Game characters during a lecture and staged a fake kidnapping. 

The school is also seeking compensatory damages in the suit from the pair, including Kanevsky, who has over 111,000 subscribers on YouTube. 

“Simply put,” the attorneys wrote, “there is no public benefit to terrorizing students to the point where they are running out of lecture halls for fear of their lives through the perpetration of ‘prank’ classroom takeovers in order to garner a handful of ‘likes’ on YouTube.”