Court Rules for Cleaners In $54 Million Pants Suit

The trouble came in spring 2005. Pearson, who had been out of work for about three years, had just been appointed to be an administrative law judge. He had gained weight, and he realized he needed to have his suit pants let out.

On May 3, he brought in a pair of pants that he planned to wear three days later. But on May 5, they were not ready, and the day after, they were nowhere to be found.

What happened next is perhaps the most significant factual dispute.

Pearson claims that the pants still weren't at the cleaners May 7 and that Soo Chung promised to keep looking. When he returned a week later, Chung tried to give him what she said were the missing trousers. But Pearson said they were not the pants he had left to be altered. Not only was the pattern different, but the pants proffered as his also had, of all things, cuffs. Only once in his adult life, he said, had he worn cuffed pants, and never, he suggested, would he have so altered his treasured Hickey Freeman suit.

Pearson wrote the Chungs, demanding $1,150 to buy a new suit. When the Chungs did not respond, Pearson swung into action, filing a lawsuit that would eventually make him the talk of the town and fodder for late-night comedy.

In her ruling, Bartnoff said that Pearson failed to prove that the pants Soo Chung offered him were not his. The judge suggested that he might have been mixed up about what he brought in.

"It certainly is plausible that the pants on the hanger with his blue and burgundy pinstriped suit jacket were not the pants that matched the jacket," Bartnoff wrote, "even if Mr. Pearson assumed that they were."

And he did, insisting as much right up until the end of his trial.

He initially sought as much as $67 million in damages, scaling back the demand shortly before trial. During the past two years, he rejected offers to settle, first for $3,000, then for $4,600 and finally for $12,000.

The judge who had been handling the case until this year headed off Pearson's efforts to turn the suit into a sort of sweeping class-action and tried to rein in Pearson's "excessive" demands for documents. But the judge found he could not simply dismiss all of the claims, and that meant Roy L. Pearson Jr. v . Soo Chung et al. was going to trial.

By the time it did, on June 12, it was in the hands of a new judge, Bartnoff. Media hordes descended, including television crews from Korea, where the Chungs were born. When Pearson testified, he lost his composure and began to cry. When Soo Chung took the witness stand, she did the same.

Yesterday, Soo Chung was smiling, grateful for the news from the court and hopeful that she would soon be able to put the incident behind her.

But when asked what she would do if Pearson turned up again with some clothes, she took no chances.

"We can't stop him from coming in as a customer," she said, speaking through a relative who translated her words from Korean.

Staff writers Joe Holley and Debbi Wilgoren contributed to this report.