Jury Finds Cru Chef Not Guilty Of Assaulting Food Runner At Restaurant

Cru restaurant's executive chef was found not guilty on Thursday of three counts of assault and battery on a woman who was working with him at the restaurant last summer and accused him of touching her innappropriately.

The trial this week in Nantucket District Court spanned two days, but the jury of four women and two men needed less than 15 minutes to return not guilty verdicts on all three charges against chef Eric Korsh.

The allegations against Korsh were lodged by a 24-year-old woman who was working at Cru as a food runner in 2025. The woman, originally from Bosnia and Herzegovina, was on Nantucket through a J1 visa program, which grants temporary legal status for students from foreign countries to work and study in the United States. Speaking through tears on the witness stand, she told the jury that Korsh had touched her inappropriately inside the restaurant on three occasions between June and July of 2025, including an incident in which she claimed he had pressed against her with his body, touching her breasts with his torso.

"In that moment, I was frozen and confused," the woman said during her testimony. "I just questioned myself what happened, and then I just felt awful and kind of humiliated, and also angry at myself because I didn't know if I should tell someone or not."

But Korsh, who has worked as the executive chef at Cru for the past five seasons, took the stand and denied all of the allegations.

"I never touched that woman sexually," Korsh told the jury. "I would imagine that we fist-bumped, because everybody does that in the kitchen. But nothing beyond that."

There were no recordings of the alleged incident, and no corroborating witnesses, leaving the jury to decide what was essentially a he-said-she-said case.

While the original charges filed by the Nantucket Police Department and brought to trial by the Cape & Islands District Attorney's office included two counts of indecent assault and battery, Judge John Julian ruled that prosecutors had not provided sufficient evidence for the jury to consider charges of indecent assault and battery.

Throughout the trial, Korsh's defense attorney Jim Merberg described the cramped quarters of Cru's kitchen. He suggested the tight dimensions of that space led staff members to brush up against one another inadvertently.

Merberg said the real motivation for the woman's allegations against Korsh was that she had overstayed her visa and was in the country illegally. By filing charges against Korsh, Merberg said, the woman could apply for a so-called U visa. This temporary U.S. immigration status can be granted to noncitizen victims of certain crimes who have suffered mental or physical abuse and agree to help law enforcement or government officials investigate or prosecute criminal activity.

An alleged argument in the kitchen of Cru in which Korsh directed the woman to do a task she did not want to do led her to be prejudiced against Korsh, Merberg said, and to seek revenge against him in a way that would also allow her to stay in the country.

"The underlying reason for this case, for her being here and making these allegations, is because she's here unlawfully," Merberg said. "But if she can get the office of the District Attorney and the police department to sign this form that she has, then maybe she can stay in the United States as long as she does this.

"This is a petulant young woman who is just angry she is not afforded what she thinks is the respect she's entitled to working in the kitchen," Merberg added. "What you have is a woman who is seeking some form of revenge."

Korsh has previously faced similar allegations of unwanted touching and berating of co-workers at a restaurant in New York City in 2018, which were chronicled in an extensive article by Eater, an online publication covering food and dining culture. He was never charged with a crime relating to the situation outlined in that story. But the jury never heard about those allegations, as Judge John Julian ruled before the trial began that the information was inadmissible.

The assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case, Aine Dillon, urged the jury to convict Korsh, describing him as a man in a position of power who was taking advantage of his status in the restaurant hierarchy to take advantage of a young woman.

"He views himself higher than them, and that’s fine; there’s a hierarchy in many workplaces," Dillon said. "I would suggest Mr. Korsh believes that hierarchy allows him to do whatever he wants.

"Mr. Korsh has a reason to lie," Dillon added. "What’s that reason? He's facing criminal charges."

Among the witnesses who were called to testify on Thursday was Cru owner Jane Stoddard, who described Korsh as truthful and honest.

After the third encounter described by the woman occurred on July 31, 2025, she left Cru and quit her job. That day, she emailed the Cru management team to describe what had happened.

Stoddard said multiple attempts to communicate with the woman in the ensuing days and weeks were ignored. Cru's management team hired an independent investigator versed in workplace conflict and allegations "to make sure our company policies were in place and that we had handled it responsibly and appropriately."

But without contact with the woman who brought the allegations, she said, the investigation was never fully completed.

Under questioning, the woman said on the stand that she did not reply to those messages from Cru's management team because she had been advised against doing so by the staff at A Safe Place, the island's domestic violence and sexual assault prevention agency, where she sought counseling in the weeks after the alleged incident.