Not Rich Enough to Get Justice: Yi Zhou’s First Silenced Victim

 

Imagine a hypothetical situation. A businessman joins a gym and gets a female personal trainer. He’s twice her age, but he’s sexually attracted to her. Shortly after joining the gym, the businessman offers the trainer to work for him “on the side”. The gym has draconian rates for trainers, taking most of the revenue they earn, so she agrees to work for him privately as a trainer.

Within days of beginning the training, the businessman begins sending her sexually explicit messages, calling her sexy and suggesting they should have sex. The female trainer politely declines. This goes on for days, the messages are insistent and sent multiple times per day.

The female trainer refuses the advances. The businessman fires her, only to apologize and rehire the woman. He resumes the incessant messaging. The trainer tries to establish boundaries, to which the businessman fires her…only to rehire again to continue the abuse. The cycle goes on for several months.

The female trainer decides to do what many women do to avoid harassment – she tells the man she has a boyfriend. The businessman becomes enraged, threatens to get her fired from the gym and brazenly tells her she should “consider to be hired for sex, lol” if she wanted to make money.

 

Does this story make you physically sick? Good. That means you aren’t a predator. Which can’t be said about the “star” of this article, Yi Zhou. You see, this hypothetical situation actually happened and became a subject of a lawsuit filed in 2019, except the “businessman” was Yi Zhou, and the trainer was a male employee she viciously sexually harassed and forced into silence.

 

Back in March, 2019, Yi Zhou (42 at the time), who was a member at one of Equinox gyms, hired Anthony Simone, a 23-year-old African-American man, as her personal trainer. Simone was an employee of Equinox.

She immediately began sending flirtatious messages to her personal trainer.

Soon after, she decided to hire him to work for her privately, as a side gig. Below is the information presented in the lawsuit.

Now, it might seem odd to hear the trainer agreed to do this, until you realize how much of the trainers’ revenue Equinox gyms actually take.

Those gyms take 45 to 70% of the trainers’ baseline earnings! It’s really not surprising to see someone in that situation agree to work on the side.

So, Mr. Simone agrees, and Zhou, having isolated him from the civil, properly monitored social environment of the gym, begins to full-on sexually harass her employee and demand they have a “no strings attached” sexual relationship.

The materials shown below are Zhou’s real text sent to Mr. Simone at the time.

Simone overtly rejected her advances, establishing professional boundaries.

Unfortunately for Mr. Simone, Yi Zhou doesn’t take no for an answer, a trait she shares with many of her sexually abusive best friends we’ve covered in the previous article.

First, she threatens to cancel the training sessions. Soon after realizing the cancelation would allow the victim to slip out of her grasp, she’d apologize and rehire Mr. Simone… Only to fire and rehire him several times within the next two months as her sexual harassment campaigns kept failing to gain her the desired “fuck buddy”.

Years later, Yi Zhou would try to reverse the blame and claim she was the one harassed, see her post made on Nov. 15, 2025:

We already know from the court documents, that Zhou hired Simone for private at-home training sessions on her own volition. And I personally find it hard to believe that a 42-year-old self-proclaimed businesswoman with a degree in Economics could be swayed into paying for extra training sessions by a 23-year-old guy.

Now I’d like you to take a closer look at the “hiking” story she mentioned in the post with me. I found this post from May, 2019, on Zhou’s public page on Instagram:

She did go on a hike in LA at the time when Simone was her employee. Let’s see what Zhou was texting Simone right before the hike took place.

So, the facts are: Simone offered a hike. She clearly stated she intended to have sex with him during or after the said hike. Doesn’t exactly look like she was a victim who was outraged by a mere touch from her personal trainer now, does it?

The sexual encounter clearly didn’t happen, and later on the hiking day (May 6), Yi Zhou fires Simone and demands he keep quiet about their (read – her) “correspondence”.

Oh, but the harassment didn’t end there!

She used employment and blackmail threats to keep rehiring and sexually harassing Mr. Simone on multiple occasions.

In her November-2025 post, she claims he “distorted” her messages. You’ve read them yourself. Fancy me this: what context would have made those nasty texts look normal in communication between an employer and an employee? Nothing comes to mind? I don’t blame you! There’s no “missing context” here. It’s crystal clear what she was doing.

But let’s keep going. The “fire/rehire & harass” cycle kept going despite Simone’s attempts to establish boundaries.

The absolute nerve of Zhou to sexually harass her victim, and then threaten to take away his income source and “advising” him to do sex work instead! You have to be a special kind of narcissistic trash to lack self-awareness and empathy to that extent!

Anyway, Mr. Simone clearly was at his wit’s end with her, so she did what many victims of harassment do: he told Zhou he was “taken”. Instead of finally taking the hint, Yi Zhou lashed out at Simone in an absolute onslaught of abusive texts.

I am presenting the whole evidence from the court case below, just to let you see the sheer magnitude of the shit-storm a narcissistic abuser unleashes when their victim tries to escape.

Does this kind of psychotic texting remind you of anything?

Yeah, she REALLY doesn’t like to be told “no”.

Once she realized the “fuck buddy” situationship wasn’t happening, she threatened Simone and got him fired from Equinox.

Here she is, blackmailing Simone and verbally attacking his girlfriend, a woman she doesn’t even know.

Zhou claimed Simone was the one harassing her to Equinox. Being a luxury gym and health club corporation, Equinox raced to sweep the case under the rug by firing Simone without an internal investigation.

Funnily enough, Zhou couldn’t provide ANY evidence of Simone sexually harassing her in the court documents. A bit odd, isn’t it?

And she actually attempted to rehire him privately AGAIN after getting him fired! Yes, really.

With a clear case of wrongful termination and sexual harassment, Mr. Simone filed a lawsuit against Yi Zhou and her company that had privately hired him in November, 2019.

What happened next is pretty obvious. In his lawsuit, Mr. Simone requested $25,000 to be paid in damages. The case was in court for almost a year during peak-COVID times. The case hearings were postponed, legal papers kept getting shuffled, case was reassigned, on February 10, 2020, Mr. Simone filed for a protective order against Zhou and the order WAS GRANTED the same day.

Then, on September 30, 2020, Mr. Simone files a request for dismissal.

Now, “dismissal with prejudice” means he won’t be able to sue her again for the case described here. Why would a man who’s clearly been victimized and unlawfully fired, who has all the evidence he needs to win the case, suddenly walk it all back?

Two words: financial settlement.

Zhou realized she wasn’t going to win, the court case would cost her a lot of money, and the conviction might pose a serious problem for any future US-visa/Green card applications… And all Simone asked for was $25,000. Not exactly millions of dollars. It was much easier to throw some money at the victim and make it all go away.

And thus, the case was closed. Years later Zhou would insist the court threw the case out, but no, as you can see, the victim had to file for dismissal. The court that granted him a protective order against her clearly took him seriously.

And on top of all that, Zhou openly says her victim “wanted to tap into her insurance $$$”. The absolute gull to have silenced the victim of her abuse, only to turn around and treat him as some peasant looking for a handout.

Funny how Karma came back to haunt her just four days after that November post, when Esquire announced the release of an article insinuating that her latest smear campaign against a collaborator was an attempt to fish for a financial settlement. Oh, Ms. Zhou didn’t like that, let me tell you!

Doesn’t feel nice when you’re deemed the one “not rich enough” to get justice, does it, Ms. Zhou? And yet, you had no problem slandering your first victim the same way…

 

And thus, Yi Zhou, this “victim advocate”, who operated fake charities, lied about donating money to a war relief fund, ran multiple smear campaigns against her collaborators, blackmailed and sexually harassed a much younger employee, and who is still actively supporting 6 sexual abusers instead of fighting for any of their many victims, got away with it.

Or at least she thought she did.