A former prosecutor in the Denver District Attorney’s Office will be disbarred after she framed a colleague for sexual harassment, a state disciplinary panel ruled this week. Yujin Choi falsely accused Dan Hines, a criminal investigator in the district attorney’s office, of sexually harassing her, according to the Tuesday ruling from the Office of Presiding Disciplinary Judge, which handles professional discipline for Colorado attorneys. Choi created fake text messages, altered her cellphone records and ultimately destroyed her laptop and phone to try to sell her deceit, the 26-page ruling found. The disbarment will take effect in roughly 35 days, and Choi can appeal the decision. “Unremitting honesty must at all times be the backbone of the legal profession,” the ruling reads. “When a lawyer repeatedly employs deceit and dishonesty to harm another person, that lawyer corrodes the integrity of the profession and threatens to compromise public confidence in the legal system.” Choi graduated from law school in late 2018 and quickly rose through the ranks at the Denver District Attorney’s Office after she was hired in May 2019. She was fired in November 2022 after an internal investigation into her sexual harassment complaint revealed her deceit. But she also made a prior false accusation against Hines in 2021 that — though unproven — nevertheless resulted in Hines being transferred and ordered not to contact Choi. That initial false accusation set off a years-long ordeal for Hines that damaged his reputation and overall well-being, he said Friday. He filed a lawsuit against Denver District Attorney Beth McCann last month. “I just felt like it was like a bad dream,” he said, adding that he spent 10 years in the military and 20 years with the Pennsylvania State Police before joining the district attorney’s office in 2019. “You attempt to hold yourself to a certain standard, and when someone comes along and makes those kinds of allegations against you, it destroys you… I wouldn’t wish this upon anybody. After the first one, when I had no way to disprove it, I was living in hell… I felt there was no way out, that everything I had lived for and stood for was destroyed. I felt like it was an embarrassment.” A person who answered a phone number listed for Choi in legal documents hung up when reached by a Denver Post reporter Friday, and Choi did not immediately return an email seeking comment. Choi first levied an allegation of sexual misconduct against Hines in 2021, when she told her superiors that he’d made an inappropriate sexual comment to her. Hines adamantly denied the allegation and an internal investigation did not find enough evidence to prove or disprove Choi’s claim. Still, Hines was transferred to a different area so that he would not work near Choi, and he was instructed to avoid her, he said Friday. “I was told I couldn’t talk about it, but word got out about that allegation, and you can imagine the perception it creates — ‘He must have done something wrong because they moved him,’ ” he said. Hines felt the agency’s internal investigation was incomplete. Leadership in the office insinuated that Choi should be believed and was courageous for coming forward about the allegations, he said. A spokesman for the Denver District Attorney’s Office, Matt Jablow, defended the office’s internal investigations Friday. “We believe the investigations were handled appropriately,” he said. In 2022, Choi claimed Hines sent her a series of inappropriate text messages. She provided screenshots of the messages — but they fell apart under scrutiny. Hines provided internal investigators his own cellphone records, which showed he hadn’t sent any texts to Choi. Choi then provided her own records, which showed he had. Investigators pulled the records directly from Verizon and discovered that Choi had texted the inappropriate texts to herself and changed the name in her phone to make it appear as though Hines had sent them. They also found that Choi altered her phone records to insert Hines’ phone number before she provided those records to investigators. 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She told investigators she’d unintentionally dropped her phone in a bath and, then, upset about that, had spilled water on her laptop, destroying both devices the weekend before they were to be examined. “In our view, this narrative is not plausible,” the panel ruled. Hines said Friday he hopes the lawsuit he filed will prompt changes to how such internal investigations are handled in the future in the district attorney’s office, and said he’d like McCann to publicly apologize for the way the office handled the initial complaint. He’d also like to see Choi face criminal charges. The Denver District Attorney’s Office referred the case to the Larimer County District Attorney’s Office in December 2022, and prosecutors there declined to press charges against Choi. Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.