Will Joelson.
William Aubrey Joelson, who goes by Will, is described throughout the record as a longtime friend of the Driz family. He was the fourth defendant found liable in the civil case, one of the men who took part in the 2015 attack on three people who had stepped in to stop a beating.
At the civil trial, Joelson denied kicking one of the victims. Then the video was played. Confronted with it, he admitted that his own sworn testimony had been false, and, by Anne Greene's account of the trial, testified that his own attorney, Lewis Adelson, had told him to lie. A jury assessed roughly $8.6 million in punitive damages against him, the largest single share aimed at any one defendant by one of the plaintiffs.
Unlike the Driz brothers, Joelson does not appear in the Los Angeles criminal case over the 2015 attack. We found no criminal charges on record against him in that matter. If that changes, or if you have documents that speak to it, send them our way and we will update this page.
In July 2021 an L.A. jury ordered Joelson and his co-defendants to pay $72,645,492 to the people they attacked. He is jointly liable for the whole judgment, which under California's 10% statutory interest has grown toward $122 million and remains entirely uncollected. Like the others, he represented himself at the civil trial.
Sources: LA Superior Court civil docket No. BC643270 (Greene v. Driz); · Kristensen LLP · L.A. Patch · Beverly Press.
