Ejected Dodgers Fans Want 2011 Bryan Stow Beating Told to Jury Ahead of Nov. 2 Trial

A Los Angeles courtroom fight over a single ejection at Dodger Stadium is now dragging in one of the ugliest chapters in the team's history: the 2011 beating of Giants fan Bryan Stow.

Luis Ortiz and Joanna Maria Iniguez sued the Dodgers in January 2025, claiming security guards used excessive force and wrongly threw them out of a game on October 5, 2024, against the San Diego Padres, according to the Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit reported by The Independent. Their complaint alleges assault, battery, false imprisonment, civil rights violations, and negligent hiring, retention and supervision. Trial is scheduled for November 2.

Two other fans ran onto the field. Ortiz and Iniguez watched security take them down and thought it was too rough. Iniguez made an obscene gesture at the guards, according to the suit. A female guard then approached the pair and told them they had to leave. They protested that they hadn't done anything wrong.

The legal fight now underway is about something bigger than one ejection.

Why Stow matters to this case

Bryan Stow was beaten into a coma in a Dodger Stadium parking lot in 2011. A Los Angeles Superior Court jury in 2014 awarded him roughly $18 million in damages. The jury put 75% of the blame on the two men who attacked him and 25% on the Dodgers organization. Former team owner Frank McCourt was found not liable at all.

That case became the reason stadium security got overhauled. And that overhaul is exactly what the plaintiffs' attorney wants jurors to hear about now.

On Monday, the lawyer filed papers with Judge Upinder Kalra opposing a Dodgers motion to keep any mention of the Stow attack out of the trial. His argument: security got dramatically tighter after Stow, and that tightening is why guards allegedly "run roughshod" over fans now, even in minor incidents like this one.

"The fact that security at Dodgers games has increased to the point that it currently exists, largely as a result of the Bryan Stow incident, is clearly relevant evidence," the plaintiffs' attorney wrote, according to court papers cited by The Independent.

The theory: the Dodgers built a "zero-tolerance" security posture out of Stow, and that posture is what led guards to eject two fans for objecting to how others were treated, rather than for doing anything themselves.

The Dodgers' side

The team's attorneys have denied the allegations. In prior filings, they argued that whatever happened to Ortiz and Iniguez was the result of their own "reckless, negligent or improper conduct," according to court papers referenced by The Independent.

If two people are gesturing at security guards and refusing to leave when told to, the team's lawyers are arguing the fans brought the confrontation on themselves. Nothing in the available court record suggests the Dodgers have conceded any part of the plaintiffs' account of the ejection itself.

What's actually being litigated right now

This isn't a trial yet. It's a pretrial evidentiary fight over what jurors get to hear when the trial starts November 2. The Dodgers want the 15-year-old Stow case walled off as irrelevant and prejudicial. The plaintiffs want it in as proof of an institutional pattern.

Judge Kalra hasn't ruled yet on the admissibility question, based on the filings reported so far. That ruling will shape how the trial plays out. If Stow comes in, the Dodgers are stuck defending not just one October night in 2024 but the team's entire security philosophy in front of a jury. If it stays out, the case narrows to what these two specific guards did to these two specific fans.

Can a plaintiff use a defendant's own past liability, and its response to that liability, as evidence the defendant is now overcorrecting in the other direction? The Dodgers' security response to Stow was, by any measure, a reasonable and arguably necessary reaction to a jury finding them partly liable for a fan being beaten unconscious. Whether that same response constitutes evidence of a pattern of overreach 13 years later is exactly what Judge Kalra will have to sort out before jurors are seated in November.

No trial date has moved. No ruling on the motion has been reported. The next concrete step is Judge Kalra's decision on whether the Stow evidence comes in, which will land sometime before the November 2 trial date.