The Trial of UCLA Business School Dean Antonio Bernardo for Suspending and Libelling Gordon Klein

Tuesday, July 1 begins the trial of Antonio Bernardo, Dean of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, on allegations by Continuing Lecturer Gordon Klein of defamation, breach of contract, and retaliation for refusal to perform an unlawful action (racial discrimination in exams). In essence, the claim is that when Klein refused to delay final exams for Black students, Dean Bernardo destroyed his consulting practice by suspending him and accusing him of “misconduct” and “incredibly ignorant and hurtful sentiments” that were “inexcusable” in “how he responded to a student’s request for understanding during protests against racial injustice”. ¹ University investigations quickly cleared Klein of any misconduct-by-email, but his million-dollar-a-year consulting practice dried up immediately (he had been prominent nationwide, even internationally, as an expert witness for corporate lawsuit damages). Klein is suing for $22 million in objective damages from loss of income. The trial in Los Angeles County is open to the public, but not on Zoom.² Klein’s Opening Statement has already been posted.

The story starts in the Crazy Year, 2020, when Gordon Klein was cancelled by an online mob after he emailed a student saying he wouldn’t let black students delay taking their final exams in his accounting class on account of the George Floyd riots, a delay the Administration had explicitly forbidden. The student inquiry was part of a well-organized campaign to find a professor to cancel, and they chose Klein as their target out of the eighty professors they contacted.³ Dean Antonio Bernardo suspended Klein for three weeks without due process, instigated a discrimination investigation, and sent out an email accusing Klein of "abuse of power" to more than 40,000 people. In September 2021, Klein filed suit against UCLA and Dean Bernardo. UCLA’s motion to dismiss was defeated in March 2022. If Klein wins his defamation claim with its $22 million claim for actual, objective, damages (destroying someone’s consulting practice is expensive), Dean Bernardo, as well as UCLA, is liable for paying it, plus punitive damages if the court finds the defamation reckless or intentional.

Klein said in an October 2020 interview with FIRE,

Within hours, word of my email reached people outside of the university and a number of these outside individuals were organized to complain to the university’s higher-ups, including the chancellor and my dean.

And they appear to have overwhelmed my dean with accusations against me. But none of the people accusing me ever identified themselves as knowing me or being one of my students. Some were from elsewhere on campus and some were not even university students.

The dean asked me to call him that evening, which I did. Much to my surprise, the dean was on the phone with me for no more than approximately one minute, after which he hung the phone up on me.

He didn’t give me a chance to explain, and he didn’t want to listen to the context. He simply acknowledged we’d known each other for a long time and that he was sending the case to the so-called DPO, which I later understood to mean the Discrimination Prevention Office.

There was a lot of media coverage at that time and after Klein filed his lawsuit, including interviews by Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson, an article he wrote for Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, and many many other articles. Klein was interviewed on the Larry O'Connor show, where talked about how he grew up in Detroit and went to the public schools before getting his accounting and law degrees; how he went to California as a professional keyboardist and played gospel music in black churches; how he turned in a colleague for discriminating against hispanics; how the student email that sparked this was from a student he knew well and liked but was part of a well-organized national campaign to go after a list of some 80 faculty; how he was thinking of retiring soon anyway and volunteering time to help student clubs.

Klein filed suit against UCLA and Dean Bernardo in California state court in this 2021 amended complaint. UCLA responded with an anti-SLAPP motion and a motion to dismiss, which were soundly defeated in March 2022. Legal Insurrection blog posted a good article on the legal proceedings up to April 2022. Notably, the defamation claim, the one for which the damages would be the biggest, is against Dean Bernardo as an individual and NOT against UCLA. Under California state law, UCLA is permitted, but not required, to pay it for him, and UCLA may not pay any punitive damages assessed against him unless the Regents personally approve it.

After much delay because of the University's legal tactics, the trial, which is a bench trial with no jury, will start in Santa Monica on July 1, 2025 and run till about July 18. It is Case No. 21SMCV01577, assigned to the Hon. H. Jay Ford III. Footnote 2 below gives details on dates.

I know a lot of stories of university persecution of professors. The standard playbook for universities— literally, I bet, in some consultant’s manual— is to do something blatantly unethical and illegal to a professor figuring it won’t cost much in dollars. The university stalls to starve him out, and then makes a settlement offer which looks big to a legal unsophisticate who’s bad at bargaining, which is the typical professor, but is much smaller than they could get if they went to trial.

Gordon Klein’s case is unusual. He has a J.D. himself and he consults as an expert witness in massive corporate law cases, so he knows plenty of high-powered lawyers. He can’t be starved out, because he’s wealthy from his consulting practice and was just teaching for fun and out of civic duty. He knows how to bargain, and how strong his case is, and he can afford to make an example of UCLA so other universities will be scared off from doing this kind of thing. He’s used the evil dean personally, and if the dean needs to sell his house to help pay damages, that will reduce the number of deans who are evil. So I am looking forward to this trial.

For More Information

• Klein's lawyers:

  • Steven M. Goldberg and David S. Markun, MARKUN ZUSMAN FRENIERE & COMPTON LLP, 222 E. Marcy St., Suite #6, Santa Fe, NM 87501,

    (505) 603-3189. sgoldberg@mzclaw.com and tmcmahon@mzclaw.com

  • David L. Burg, P.O. Box 7376, Freehold, NJ 07728

    (818) 730-9835. David@DLBurgEsq.com.

• UCLA’s lawyers (formally, “The Regents of the University of California”’s lawyers):

  • Sandra McDonough and Evan Pena, QUARLES & BRADY LLP, 101 West Broadway, Suite 1500, San Diego, California 92101-8285.

  • 619-237-5200. sandy.mcdonough@quarles.com and evan.pena@quarles.com.

• Eric Rasmusen, erasmuse61@gmail.com (Central Time)

• Gene Block, Chancellor, UCLA: 310-825-2151.

• Daniel Burnett, Assistant Director of Communications, FIRE: 215-717-3473.

• Some of the documents are at Unicourt.com (the California computer docket system, case number 21SMCV01577, doesn't provide documents for free).

• A website “Gordon Klein”, that I set up a few years ago with lots of links.

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Footnotes

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1. In another public announcement, Dean Bernardo referred to “troubling conduct by one of our lecturers in the undergraduate accounting program” and said, “Our concerns have been shared with all appropriate UCLA investigative offices,” and

We share common principles across the university of integrity, excellence, accountability, respect and service. Conduct that demonstrates a disregard for our core principles, including an abuse of power, is not acceptable. This lecturer is currently on leave from campus. His courses have been reassigned to other instructors.

2. If you want to attend, the trial is in Judge Ford's courtroom at LA Superior Court in Santa Monica. It will run from July 1 to July 18, 1:30 to 4:30 pm, Tuesdays through Fridays. July 1st to 3rd, Klein himself will testify, together with Eric Madsen, his damages expert witness. The second week various university administrators will be testifying, including Dean Bernardo on Tuesday-Wednesday, July 8-9. The closest parking lot seems to be Structure 6, 1431 Second Street, Santa Monica. Customarily, audience members sit on the same side of the aisle as the person they support. I don’t know where neutrals sit.

3. Somebody posted a spreadsheet listing the 80 professors that progressives were targeting to trap into refusing exam cancellation requests so they could be "cancelled". It's at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IX42mJZdzoi8q7iiiAWMqVpBi_3dCwn9X2xoKfnR6CI/edit#gid=1221560764. You can see how most professors caved in and did things such as making the final exam optional.