The owner of the L.A. Grand Hotel Downtown is asking a judge to carve out big chunks of a lawsuit brought by the Academy of Media Arts, arguing the whole thing is really just a straightforward lease dispute, not a grab bag of tort claims. The school, for its part, says repeated encounters with trash, violence, and drug paraphernalia in shared areas forced its campus at the property to shut down and drove families to pull their kids out. The Los Angeles Superior Court is set to weigh the fight at a hearing on April 2, 2026.
In papers filed March 6, attorneys for Sun & Sky I LLC urged Judge Thomas D. Long to toss the negligence and intentional interference causes of action, saying they simply restate the academy’s breach of contract theory and should be pared back so the case centers on the lease alone. The defense brief calls the matter an “ordinary commercial lease dispute” and asks the court to throw out what it labels “tacked-on interference claims without leave to amend.” According to MyNewsLA, the motion is set to be heard on April 2.
School Says Students Faced Hazards Inside The Building
The Academy of Media Arts filed its complaint in January 2024, alleging that the hotel’s shift to interim housing under Project Roomkey and later the city’s Inside Safe program exposed students to assaults, hypodermic needles, human waste, and other safety risks. Founder Dana Hammond told reporters the campus experienced mass withdrawals and a steep enrollment drop that left classrooms largely empty, as reported by the Los Angeles Times.
City Programs And The Demobilization Timeline
Project Roomkey, the pandemic-era program that placed vulnerable Angelenos in hotels, along with the city’s follow-on Inside Safe initiative, sits at the center of both sides’ arguments over who is responsible for conditions in and around the Grand. City officials in early 2024 outlined plans to move residents from the Grand to the Mayfair Hotel and demobilize the site by summer, a schedule that factored into the academy’s decision to lease space there, according to Spectrum News.
Owner Presses Court To Narrow The Record
Sun & Sky’s motion contends that the academy’s negligence and interference theories duplicate its breach of contract allegations and should be dismissed so the litigation can move ahead as a lease dispute only. The defense is asking the court to cut back the tort-focused claims and to bar any further amendment of those counts, according to filings summarized by MyNewsLA.
Legal Stakes
If the judge sides with the hotel owner, the academy would be largely limited to contract remedies tied to the lease and would lose access to tort-based paths to damages, including claims such as emotional distress or certain punitive awards. Lawyers for the school counter that the harm was immediate and concrete, pointing to student withdrawals, reputational damage, and operational disruption, and argue that those facts support the negligence and interference counts as pleaded, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Arguments are scheduled for the April 2 hearing, and the ruling will determine whether the lawsuit stays a relatively narrow contract fight or opens the door to broader tort discovery tied to the hotel’s former use as interim housing.
