Dirty deeds in Denver: Ex-prosecutor faked texts, destroyed devices to frame colleague

When suspicion began to mount that the young prosecutor, Yujin Choi, might have faked her sexual misconduct allegations against a Denver District Attorney's Office colleague, investigators asked to examine Choi's laptop and cell phone. But just before Choi was to have turned them in, her devices suffered a series of unlikely accidents. First, she said, she managed to drop her phone into a filled bathtub. When she pulled the phone out of the water and found it was not working, Choi went to her laptop in order to make a video call. When the call ended, Choi then knocked over a bottle of water—whoops!—directly onto the computer, which was also taken out of commission. So, when the day came to hand in her devices, neither was working. "I’m devastated that I may have tanked the investigation on my own, but that I also lost all of my personal data that were very important to me," Choi wrote to investigators. She had even, she added, gone to the local Apple Store in an attempt to retrieve the data on the devices. No luck. The rather improbable story came to light this week after articles were published in the Denver Post and New York Times. The news stories were based on a December 31, 2024, ruling against Choi from Colorado's Office of the Presiding Disciplinary Judge, which handles complaints against lawyers in the state. "In our view, [Choi's] narrative is not plausible," said the ruling. "If Respondent [that is, Choi] produced her devices in working condition, we have every confidence that the investigation would have uncovered evidence of Respondent’s dishonest conduct, including her fabrication of text messages and her manipulation of her downloaded Verizon message log."  It appeared more likely to the judge that Choi had purposely destroyed her devices. These days, of course, if you get to the point where you are contemplating device destruction as a way out of a scandal, you're probably screwed already, given how much data about our activities is backed up to cloud services, stored on remote servers, or otherwise held by third parties. That was the case with Choi's situation, too, which deteriorated sharply after she went from being the accuser to being accused.

How we got here

Choi was a young attorney a few years out of law school, working at the Denver District Attorney's Office in various roles between 2019 and 2022. Beginning in 2021, she accused her colleague, Dan Hines, of sexual misconduct. Hines, she said at first, made an inappropriate remark to her. Hines denied it and nothing could be proven, but he was still transferred to another unit. In 2022, Choi complained again. This time, she offered phone records showing inappropriate text messages she allegedly received from Hines. But Hines, who denied everything, offered investigators his own phone records, which showed no texts to Choi. Investigators then went directly to Verizon for records, which showed that "Ms. Choi had texted the inappropriate messages to herself," according to the Times. "In addition, she changed the name in her phone to make it appear as though Mr. Hines was the one who had sent them." At this point, the investigators started looking more closely at Choi and asked for her devices, leading to the incident described above. In the end, Choi was fired from the DA's office and eventually given a disbarment order by the Office of the Presiding Disciplinary Judge, which she can still appeal. For his part, Hines is upset about how he was treated during the whole situation and has filed a lawsuit of his own against the DA's office, believing that he was initially seen as a guilty party even in the absence of evidence. The case is a reminder that, despite well-founded concerns over tracking, data collection, and privacy, sometimes the modern world's massive data collection can work to one's benefit. Hines was able to escape the second allegation against him precisely because of the specific (and specifically refutable) digital evidence that was presented against him—as opposed to the murkier world of "he said/she said." Choi might have done as she liked with her devices, but her "evidence" wasn't the only data out there. Investigators were able to draw on Hines' own phone data, along with Verizon network data, to see that he had not been texting Choi at the times in question. Update: Ars Technica has obtained the ruling, which you can read here (PDF). The document recounts in great detail what a modern, quasi-judicial workplace investigation looks like: forensic device examinations, search warrants to Verizon, asking people to log into their cell phone accounts and download data while investigators look over their shoulders, etc.