The lawsuit centers on a campus incident that occurred at Beverly Hills High School in November 2024. (photo by Tabor Brewster)

Mark Mead, a middle school English teacher at the Beverly Hills Unified School District, filed litigation against the district in November 2025, accusing the district of defamation, negligence and wrongful demotion, among other allegations. The lawsuit alleges that Mead, the former executive director of school safety for the district, was wrongfully demoted to a teaching position following a “years-long crusade against him” by former journalism teacher and media director Romeo Carey.

The lawsuit centers on an on-campus incident at Beverly Hills High School in November 2024 following the Presidential Election, which ignited several controversies and has already become a focal point in other lawsuits against the district. The lawsuit filed by Mead names the BHUSD, Carey, former assistant superintendent of business services Jason Hasty and all five members of the board of education as co-defendants. Mead is represented by attorney David Clay Washington of Hadsell Stormer Renick and Dai LLP.

The lawsuit details a conflict between Mead and Carey dating back to 2017, when Mead was the principal of Beverly Hills High School. The lawsuit lists a number of accusations against Carey, including manipulating the district and “siphoning” taxpayer dollars through stipends that were approved by the district despite Mead’s concern at the time that they were unlawful. It alleges that Carey engaged in a “revenge crusade” against Mead for drawing attention to behavior that Mead believed violated district policy and education code.

The alleged hostility between the two educators appears to have reached a boiling point following the on-campus incident in November 2024 at Beverly Hills High School. Mead, the district’s executive director of school safety at the time, was accused by a student of assault during a pro-Trump rally held by students on campus. A video uploaded by KBEV, the school’s student-run news broadcast service overseen by Carey, appeared to show Mead with his hand around the student’s neck. The lawsuit accuses Carey of doctoring the video.

“He doctored a video – falsely depicting Mead choking a student in the mob – and then assigned his own journalism students to broadcast the lie as ‘news,’” the lawsuit states.

Following reporting by KBEV on the alleged assault in late 2024, Carey was placed on paid leave for three months before being reinstated, during which time the district remained mostly silent on the incident. Many students, parents and the ACLU of Southern California expressed concerns that the suspension of Carey was a potential act of retaliation and censorship. For months, KBEV students and their parents expressed outrage at BHUSD Board meetings, demanding that Carey be reinstated and that Mead be put on leave and investigated for the incident. Amid the controversy, Superintendent Michael Bregy resigned.

Following Bregy’s resignation, an investigation of Mead began, conducted by the district’s law firm Best Best and Krieger Law. The investigation was completed by August 2025 and cleared Mead of wrongdoing, concluding that the allegations of assault were not substantiated.

However, the lawsuit argues that the investigation “exacerbated the problem” because investigators did not speak to students who were in close proximity to the incident, and school security footage which Mead argued would prove his innocence was never released by the school district.

The Beverly Press reported extensively on the November 2024 campus incident at the time, including submitting a public records act request to receive the security footage that allegedly captured the incident. While the district provided the footage upon request, it was heavily blurred to the point of being completely obscured. As a result of the blurring, the only video publicly available was the KBEV report that appeared to show Mead with his hand around a student’s neck.

The lawsuit details the public records request by the Beverly Press and states that Mead and another security staff member prepared the clips, “blurring the visible students surrounding the incident to protect their privacy but leaving the central images showing that Mr. Mead had not assaulted anyone.”

However, it states that “inexplicably, [Superintendent] Bregy then required them to edit the video to blur all of the individuals shown. This instruction was unprecedented; no other security footage requested through the Public Records Act had ever been subjected to such treatment. It rendered the video useless, and actually suggested that the district itself believed Mr. Mead was guilty of the assault.”

As of February 2026, Mead remains employed by the district as an English teacher. The lawsuit alleges that Mead has been unable to find employment in administrative positions in other school districts due to the assault allegation.

“The district destroyed a veteran educator’s name and livelihood. Its own investigation exonerated Mead completely – nine months too late. By then, the damage was irreversible,” the lawsuit states. “Today, Mead earns $66,000 a year less than he did before the district demoted him for protecting students, teachers, parents and taxpayers. He now teaches middle school English. He walks into his classroom and students whisper about ‘assault’ – a lie born of the district’s cowardice and Carey’s manipulation. Meanwhile, Carey used his unwitting students’ free speech rights as a cudgel, extracting hundreds of thousands more from the feckless Board before riding off into the sunset. Sigalie Sabag, Russell Stuart, Amanda Stern, Judith Manouchehri and Rachelle Marcus remain silent, refusing to right this wrong. Instead, they prefer to focus on more pressing matters, like purging ‘woke’ curricula, banning the pride flag, mandating that the Israeli flag be flown on campus and purging the district of teachers who criticize Donald Trump on their private Facebook pages.”

Mead did not provide a comment by press time.

In June 2025 – just two months after reinstating Carey – the district announced Carey’s retirement. Shortly after his departure, the district no longer allowed KBEV students to facilitate the live public broadcast of BHUSD Board of Education meetings – a longtime practice that students said provided them with real-world experience. The district instead created its own channel to livestream the public meetings, with comments disabled.Additionally, the KBEV program is currently undergoing a restructuring of both its physical studio and its overall program mission. Under Carey’s replacement, Kyle Newman, the program’s focus has shifted from news to a broader curriculum including film production and entertainment.

Carey did not provide a comment by press time.

“The district does not comment on ongoing litigation,” a spokesperson for the BHUSD said.

The next hearing in the lawsuit is scheduled for April 10.