An Idaho university owes a local coffee shop owner $4 million after a jury agreed she lost her contract following a dispute over her public support for law enforcement.
On September 13, Sarah Fendley was awarded $3 million for loss of business, damage to reputation, mental and emotional anguish, and personal humiliation, and another $1 million in punitive damages from a specific school staff member.
The money will come from Boise State University, after a jury found the school trampled on the First Amendment rights of the owner of Big City Coffee.
It had initially sued for $10 million after thin blue line stickers it had placed outside the campus sparked a backlash from students. This, lawyers said, came during protests organized in response to the killing of George Floyd.
Forced to close within a year, Fendley later claimed the school terminated its contract because of its support for police, a claim jurors agreed with.
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An Idaho school owes $4 million to a local coffee shop owner after a dispute over her public support for law enforcement.
On September 13, Sarah Fendley was awarded $3 million for loss of business, damage to reputation, mental and emotional anguish, and personal humiliation, and another $1 million in punitive damages from a specific school staff member.
“I am grateful to the jury of 12 peers who unanimously returned a verdict in my favor,” Fendley, who cried when the verdict was read, told KTVB in a statement.
‘I am grateful that you have dedicated three weeks of your lives to listening to my case.
‘It’s been almost four years since I was expelled from the Boise State campus and my attorney, Mike Roe, said it best in his closing arguments to the jury: “This case is not about liberals versus conservatives, blacks versus whites, gays versus straights.”
“It’s not even about being for and against the police,” he continued.
‘These are highly educated, highly paid government officials running the largest university in Idaho brutally mistreating a small businesswoman because they didn’t care and doing so was easier than doing the right thing.
“In that mistreatment,” he said, “they violated (my) First Amendment rights to freedom of expression and opinion.”
In a statement also sent to KTVB, Keely Duke, the attorney representing the school, said: “We respectfully but firmly disagree with today’s verdict and plan to appeal. We were honoring the First Amendment rights of all involved.”
Meanwhile, Duke also represented two BSU administrators: former vice president for student affairs and enrollment management Leslie Webb and chief financial and operations officer and vice president for finance and operations Alicia Estey.
The money will come from Boise State University, after a jury found the school trampled on the First Amendment rights of the owner of Big City Coffee.
The latter took the stand on Friday as the last witness after hastily calling a meeting with Fendley in 2020 to warn him about the social media “firestorm” his post had created, the company owner sued.
Estey also secretly recorded much of the meeting, and hours before it began, she and other administrators had been drafting a press release about the company leaving the campus, Fendley’s attorney said.
This, she argued, made it clear that she and Webb had only one outcome in mind: giving in to the demands of outraged student activists.
Estey responded on Friday: “We did not take any retaliation against her.”
“She made the decision to leave, it was her decision,” he continued. “There was no retaliation.”
The Big City campus store would close four days after the meeting, after student activists criticized Fendley and his online store.
“I hope they don’t go there if they truly support their fellow bipoc and other students, staff and faculty,” one student posted on Snapchat at the time, using an acronym that refers to Black and Indigenous people, as well as people of color.
Fendley, who had been engaged to a former Boise police officer who had been paralyzed in a shooting at the time, responded with her own public posts on Facebook and Instagram, in which she doubled down on her support for police.
Seen in tears as the verdict was read, Fendley, who was forced to close in 2021 after the school terminated her contract, originally sued for $10 million.
This came after the thin blue line stickers he placed outside the campus location sparked a backlash from the student body.
Shortly afterward, her contract with the school was terminated, prompting her to file the now-settled lawsuit.
Jurors awarded an additional $1 million in punitive damages from Webb, who argued it was his job to listen to students as the school’s former vice president of student affairs.
She currently works as an administrator at the University of Montana.
At the time of writing, it remains unclear whether the university, insurance, or Webb and Estey themselves will pay for the damages.
