The conservative Christian owners of a traditional Korean, women-only nude spa in Washington state had their lives turned upside down for refusing access to trans-identifying males with an intact penis.
After spending the better part of a decade fighting the Washington Human Rights Commission — which had determined the spa’s female-only rule violated state law — the immigrant Korean family who operate Olympus Spa now may have their case heard by a court that might actually affirm their God-given rights.
‘It feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds.’
Alliance Defending Freedom and the Pacific Justice Institute, the organization that has defended Sun Lee and his family from the outset, asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to take up the case Olympus v. Armstrong.
“This is not about just one law. It’s not just about one business,” Brad Dacus, founder and president of the PJI, told Blaze News. “This is a case that fundamentally asks the question: To what extent can the government require people to have to forfeit and compromise their sincerely held religious beliefs and conscience in order to operate a business in the United States?”
Legal warfare
Prior to 2020, Olympus Spa had maintained its female-only policy for over two decades without complaint.
It learned in late 2020, however, that Caleb Richmond — a man who was once married to a woman and now goes by Haven Wilvich — had filed a complaint with the Washington Human Rights Commission alleging that in January of that year, the spa had denied him services and “stated that transgender women without surgery are not welcome because it would make other customers and staff uncomfortable.”
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L-R: Sun Lee and the front of his establishment. Pacific Justice Institute
According to court documents, the spa required that entrants “physically present in the nude as … female,” further noting, “Biological women are welcome.”
It is unclear whether Richmond ever visited the spa.
Sun Lee, co-owner of the spa, explained to a WHRC investigator that the spa is modeled on jjimjilbang, sex-segregated bathhouses in Korea, which require that guests be nude inside the pool area. He further denied any violation of the Washington Law Against Discrimination.
The Washington law prohibits denial of “the full enjoyment of any of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, or privileges of any place of public resort, accommodation, assemblage, or amusement” on the basis of sex, race, and “sexual orientation,” which the state has defined to include “gender expression or identity.”
Lee’s explanation fell on deaf ears.
Threatened with prosecution, the spa signed a pre-finding settlement agreement requiring compliance with WLAD while reserving the right to mount a constitutional challenge.
Olympus Spa sued the WHRC in March 2022, alleging that enforcement of the discrimination law against the establishment violated the owners’ First Amendment rights to free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of association.
Among the issues raised in the complaint was that the enforcement of the discrimination law requires the spa to render services to nude males and females and thus forces them to “choose between violating the law or their religious convictions.”
This, said the complaint, constitutes a “substantial burden” on the Lee family’s religious beliefs.
Brad Dacus emphasized to Blaze News that the Lee family “did not want to be in the news. They didn’t want their business in the news. They just wanted to run their business with a clear conscience.”
A Washington District Court judge dismissed the case with prejudice in 2023, but Lee appealed to the Ninth Circuit.
At the appellate court in May 2025, the family was delivered another upset, as a three-judge panel ruled that the spa cannot sue the WSHRC on First Amendment grounds.
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Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
Olympus Spa petitioned the Ninth Circuit for a panel rehearing and/or a full-court rehearing of the case. The business was denied in March. This time, however, the Lees were not alone in their disappointment.
Judge Lawrence VanDyke, an appointee of President Donald Trump, rebuked his colleagues for refusing to rehear what he characterized as “a case about swinging d**ks.”
“Sometimes, it feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds,” wrote VanDyke. “Woke regulators and complicit judges seem entirely willing, even eager, to ignore the consequences that their Frankenstein social experiments impose on real women and young girls.”
‘The state is turning their lives into a nightmare.’
Van Dyke accused his colleagues of allowing “Washington State bureaucrats to trample” on Americans’ constitutional rights.
The WHRC and Democrat Gov. Bob Ferguson did not respond to Blaze News’ requests for comment.
Despite all the setbacks, the Lee family is evidently unwilling to surrender.
The final battle
In the petition for a writ of certiorari filed on Monday, attorneys for the family asked the U.S. Supreme Court to consider whether forcing “a Christian, all-female jjimjilbang to admit males violates the Free Exercise Clause” and “whether a policy that differentiates based on anatomy discriminates ‘based on gender identity or transgender status.'”
The petition highlights loopholes in Washington’s discrimination law as applied to jjimjilbang spas — such a spa operated as a private club or a sorority organization would be free under the law to exclude male patrons, for instance. It also emphasizes that under the Supreme Court’s precedents, “the Constitution protects the Spa owners’ religiously motivated desire to keep a male out of a space reserved for female patrons as young as 13 years old.”
“Based on a single complaint by a male who may never even have visited the spa, Washington state decided its views on gender identity must override a centuries-old cultural practice and deep religious conviction, turning its enforcement power against a Korean family’s small business,” said Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel John Bursch.
“The state is turning their lives into a nightmare, insisting they compromise not only their deeply help religious beliefs but also the privacy and safety of women and girls as young as 13 who visit the spa,” continued Bursch. “The First Amendment forbids all that, which is why we’re urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the Lee family’s case.”
Sun Lee thanked the Pacific Justice Institute for its legal support and expressed hope that the high court justices “will recognize the importance of the constitutional questions before them and give thoughtful consideration to the privacy, dignity, and rights of women in such a deeply sensitive and consequential matter.”
Brad Dacus told Blaze News that while SCOTUS agrees to hear very few petitioners’ cases, he suspects this case has an excellent chance of being heard, as it is “dealing with a very fundamental issue of civil rights” to which the high court has proven sensitive.
Dacus stressed that if other business owners across America encounter similar encroachments on their religious freedom and constitutional rights, “they should not hesitate to contact us because we work completely without charge.”
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Christian, Alliance defending freedom, Washington state, Supreme court, First amendment, Transgender, Politics