A Los Angeles filmmaker and his daughter had been awarded greater than $3 million after a jury discovered Los Angeles County negligent for accidents the person sustained when a sheriff’s deputy shot him within the face with a non-lethal projectile throughout a protest towards police brutality in 2020.
Cellin Gluck, 67, alleged in a lawsuit filed the next summer time that the county and a lot of unnamed sheriff’s deputies dedicated negligence and battery, violated Gluck’s civil rights and falsely imprisoned each him and his daughter Caroline, 28.
A Los Angeles County Superior Court docket jury decided earlier this month that the deputy — whose identification was by no means decided — used unreasonable power to manage the gang of protesters when firing the projectile and harmed the elder Gluck. It additionally discovered that witnessing the incident prompted Caroline to “undergo critical emotional misery,” based on the grievance.
The director, producer and actor — who has labored for many years on movies together with “Transformers” and “Bear in mind the Titans” — stated he did nothing improper throughout a protest in L.A.’s Fairfax District on Could 30, 2020, lower than every week after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis.
A policeman reacts to a can of soda thrown by a protester on Figueroa Road in downtown Los Angeles on within the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis.
(Luis Sinco/Luis Sinco)
Gluck alleged he was unarmed, dealing with away from the deputies throughout a peaceable protest and was “not posing an affordable risk to anybody’s security when deputies determined to fireside their weapons in his course,” based on the grievance.
The Glucks had been making an attempt to assist one other protester who had been shot within the face with a bean bag, when the deputy shot Gluck with the projectile and “blood beg[an] speeding down his cheek,” the grievance stated.
The “impression fractured his face, embedded shrapnel in his nasal cavity … left him with everlasting disfigurement, imaginative and prescient issues, and extreme emotional trauma,” based on a press release by the Glucks’ attorneys.
The jury introduced it was awarding Gluck $3.5 million and Caroline $300,000 on the conclusion of an roughly five-hour listening to in Los Angeles on Aug. 20.
Gluck praised the decision throughout an interview with The Occasions.
“Justice was discovered as a result of they’ll be held accountable,” he stated.
“Something might be deadly, but it surely’s … the individual with the finger on the set off who’s in the end received to be held accountable.”
However the jury decided that each he and the gang had been additionally negligent within the incident, based on courtroom data; Gluck was 20% liable for the hurt completed to him, and the gang was 15% accountable. In consequence, Los Angeles County Superior Court docket Decide Michael Shultz’s “courtroom will scale back the quantity of the jury’s award by 35%: to $2.275 million for Cellin Gluck and $195,000 for Caroline Gluck,” the Los Angeles Workplace of County Counsel stated in a written assertion.
Nevertheless, Glucks’ attorneys stated in an interview that it’s not completely clear whether or not that may occur. The workplace of county counsel stated in an e mail that it ”is exploring all of its choices on this case, together with the opportunity of an enchantment.”
Cellin Gluck stands for a portrait at his dwelling on Sunday, Aug. 24, 2025 in Santa Monica.
(Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Occasions)
“Though a special administration is in place now than in 2020, we acknowledge the significance of totally reviewing and evaluating what occurred at the moment to establish classes that may assist us enhance our service to the neighborhood,” the Sheriff’s Division stated in an emailed assertion.
Carl Douglas, an lawyer for the Glucks, stated the truth that a jury awarded greater than $3 million to one more sufferer of unreasonable power “ought to outrage county taxpayers,” who’ve paid many hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to protesters and others harmed by sheriff’s deputies lately.
“What the case confirmed is that coaching is barely pretty much as good because the officers who observe the coaching. On this case we imagine the officers didn’t observe their coaching,” Douglas stated. “The one method to cease these sorts of payouts is that if deputies are held accountable.”
