HOUSTON – Eric Sim, a now 38-year-old former NASA engineer, was set to go to trial in just two days on seven sexual assault charges, but on Tuesday, all cases were dismissed after prosecutors said a majority couldn’t be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
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Sim, who had been a star in a viral NASA “Gangnam Style” parody video in 2012, was arrested last March at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. He’d been out of jail on a $700,000 bond and was forced to resign his position at NASA, his defense attorney Neal Davis said.
According to records, the alleged assaults occurred between 2019 and 2022.
Sim used dating apps like Hinge, East Meets East, and OkCupid to meet women, pretending he wanted a serious relationship before assaulting them, prosecutors said at a press conference last April, when they sought victims internationally.
A search warrant revealed investigators found sex tapes on Sim’s devices and a spreadsheet that listed hundreds of women and details about their sexual encounters.
At that press conference, former District Attorney Kim Ogg said Sim’s NASA credentials and international travel suggested there were more victims, but after new District Attorney Sean Teare’s administration took a deep dive into the evidence, the charges were dropped.
Of the seven dismissals, one of them was at the victim’s request, according to records.
“The survivors in these cases are our priority. They are the victims of predatory acts, and we stand firm in recognizing their trauma. Forcing them to relive their pain in a public courtroom serves no purpose. Over the past 11 months, our investigators and prosecutors have sifted through terabytes of data, only to uncover insufficient evidence to prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt. We owe it to these survivors to ensure justice, not re-victimization,” DA Sean Teare’s office wrote in a statement Tuesday afternoon.
Sim’s defense attorney, Neal Davis, called the case politically motivated.
“Politics are politics, it was an election year, HPD rape unit was under severe criticism for dropping the ball on cases. And that’s where this case came about. Eric Sim became a political football and he became the face of some sort of serial rapist when in fact he didn’t do any of this. And that’s what I’ve said since day one. My question to Miss Ogg is, ‘Where does he go to get his reputation back? How does he put his life back together?’” Davis said.
KPRC 2 has tried to reach Ogg for a response.
“I said this case is going to be dismissed or won from day one. I was confident of it then and I’m confident of it now. And I’m just glad we have the ear of the DA’s office to listen to us, because what we did was collaborate with them and explain the evidence we had and our position,” Davis said.
He said there was a lot of digital forensic evidence, including text messages, that helped lead to the dismissals.
“This whole thing devastated (Sim). He lost his job, lived under house arrest for a year, and his life was on hold,” Davis said. “It’s a good start, but it’ll be hard for him to completely rebuild from this.”
Davis added that Sim is now focused on getting his life and reputation back on track, although he noted that the damage to his name may never go away.
