by Richard W. Millar, Jr.

I have only what may be called an “entry level” understanding of how text messaging works, especially when contrasting it with email communications. I know, for example, that emails may exist in perpetuity well after the last cow comes home. My resident expert, Siri, informs me, however, that the contents of text messages are rarely kept by phone providers more than a few days though there are likely to be permanent records showing the dates and, perhaps, durations, of text messages, as opposed to content as that may form the basis on which the user is billed.

In the course of sniffing out column material, I recently have become more educated about texts and some of what I have learned is frightening even though I have chronicled some of the more unusual antics of lawyers and judges over the last twenty-plus years. Most of the time I report (if that’s the right word) on activities that, shall we say, exceed expected normal social boundaries. This time I report on something that I didn’t know could be done.

This case involves the office of the Denver District Attorney, a deputy District Attorney, and one of the office’s investigators. The deputy’s name is Yujin Choi, a female prosecutor who worked in “an elite unit” dealing with felony domestic violence and child abuse cases. The investigator is a man named Daniel Hines who, for reasons which are “opaque” somehow got in Ms. Choi’s cross-hairs and whom she claimed sent her sexually harassing texts.

One evening Ms. Choi, while out with some of her colleagues, sent a text message to her supervisor stating that “I also wanted to share a disgusting text that I got from a person in our office . . . .” Her supervisor asked about the text and she replied, “Ummm sex doll . . . Retaliation?” She was asked to send a copy of the text but she declined saying, “Well, I can, but you’d know who it is.” She said that she did not want to report the text to the DA’s “front office.”

She did, however, show the text to those she was with and it said, “Yujin, please stop talking about what I didn’t do to our colleagues. You are using your looks against innocent people. If you want to act like a sex doll to get a sugar daddy . . . fine, but that will not be me.”

When she was on a bus headed home, she sent her supervisor a screen shot of another text that said, “Don’t be stupid.” After a back-and-forth text “chat,” she sent screenshots of three more texts which included one that said, “Let’s talk.” She also sent copies to two of her co-workers and told them that Mr. Hines had sent the messages.

The next day, a Saturday, she disclosed a new text from Mr. Hines which said, “I’m sorry, hope you have a nice weekend.” She told her supervisor that she thought she was having a stroke.

As you can imagine, this was reported to higher-ups including the District Attorney, and the Chief Deputy. An investigation ensued despite Ms. Choi’s statements to the effect that she did not want to pursue (what she had started) because she thought she would be ignored and would receive “blowback.”

When Mr. Hines was approached, he was “visibly upset” and adamantly denied sending any of the messages. He offered to take a polygraph and provided his iPhone for inspection. He also logged into his Verizon account which indicated that he did not send the texts. An “extraction” by a technician in the office did not disclose any of the texts.

The technician then examined Ms. Choi’s phone and could not locate the messages which Ms. Choi then said she must have deleted. The technician did verify the accuracy of her phone’s clock.

Ms. Choi then provided a copy of her Verizon’s message log which showed a text from Mr. Hines phone with the proper time stamp.

Faced with inexplicably conflicting Verizon logs, the DA’s investigator decided to go directly to the source and subpoenaed Verizon.

In the meantime, over the weekend, Ms. Choi suffered two calamities. While drawing a bath for “stress-relief” she placed her phone on a bathtub tray across the tub and when she came back after getting water bottle, she found that the tray and her phone had tumbled into the tub effectively destroying the phone. Then “rattled” she went to her laptop and the open water bottle slipped from her hands, spilling its contents on her laptop and effectively destroying it as well.

Don’t you hate when that happens? Especially twice.

Then the subpoenaed Verizon records arrived. They confirmed that Mr. Hines had not sent the message at issue and that, and here it gets really interesting, Ms. Choi was both the sender and the recipient. The end result was that Ms. Choi was fired and on December 31, 2024, disbarred, thus ending a “she said, he said” situation which turned out to be “she said what he said when he, in fact, said nothing.”

Richard W. Millar, Jr. is tired and retired. He can be reached at dickmillar9@gmail.com.