Boise State University administrators owe Big City Coffee owner Sarah Fendley $4 million after a jury ruled unanimously in favor of Fendley and awarded her damages in her lawsuit, capping a three-week long trial that centered around the closure of her campus shop nearly four years ago.
The jury of 12 Ada County residents sided with Fendley after deliberating for about three hours Friday night.
The jury awarded $3 million to Fendley for business losses, mental and emotional distress, personal humiliation and lost reputation. One of the Boise State officials named in the lawsuit, Leslie Webb, the university’s former vice president of student affairs, owes Fendley an additional $1 million in punitive damages, the jury decided. Punitive damages are punishment for behavior found to be especially harmful.
After the jury left the courtroom, Fendley broke down in tears.
“Sarah got her day after all these years,” Fendley’s attorney, Michael Roe of Givens Pursley, told a group of reporters after the verdict was delivered. “We’re very pleased.”
Fendley sued Boise State for $10 million after the campus shop closed in October 2020, a month and a half after opening next to the university’s library. She argued that the university forced her out of the location after a small group of students raised concerns about her pro-police views, including support of the “thin blue line,” the idea that police form the line between order and lawlessness.
The case honed in on two individual defendants: Webb and Alicia Estey, who was Boise State’s vice president for university affairs at the time and has since been promoted to chief financial and operating officer.
Initial counts in the lawsuit against the university and administrators in their official capacities were previously dismissed, because the 11th Amendment bars lawsuits against the state, which the university and the officials represented. Other counts related to the Idaho Constitution, Idaho law or contractual issues were also dismissed. But much of the lawsuit was allowed to proceed.
The jury had a handful of questions to deliberate, including whether Fendley and Big City Coffee proved their First Amendment retaliation claims against Webb and Estey, and whether those violations caused injury to Fendley and Big City Coffee. To each, they answered yes.
Of the $3 million in damages, the jury awarded $1 million for business losses, $500,000 for mental and emotional distress, $500,000 for personal humiliation and $1 million for lost reputation.
Roe said Friday afternoon during closing statements that Boise State retaliated against Fendley for expressing her First Amendment rights to free speech. Fendley has been vocal about her support for police online and in her downtown shop, which displays a 3-by-5-inch thin blue line flag near the door.
At the time the lawsuit was filed, she was engaged to Kevin Holtry, a former Boise police officer who became paralyzed from the waist down in 2016 after a gunfight with a fugitive on the Boise Bench. The two are no longer together.
Boise State’s attorney, Keely Duke of Duke Evett, argued that Fendley wanted special treatment and for Webb and Estey to weaponize the student code of conduct to punish students for expressing opinions she didn’t like. Duke maintained that it was Fendley who chose to terminate the campus contract as administrators remained neutral in the face of opposition to Fendley and Big City Coffee from several students.
The idea of police as a thin blue line is a century old. But thin blue line flags weren’t created until 2014, by a college student motivated by protests against three police killings that year: a chokehold of a man in Staten Island and the shootings of a 12-year-old boy in Cleveland and an 18-year-old man in Ferguson, Missouri, all Black.
The flags rose in popularity when the U.S. saw growing calls for police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s death in May 2020. Floyd, a Black man, was killed by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, a white man. His last words, “I can’t breathe,” captured on video, sparked a wave of Black Lives Matter protests that rocked the country for months and raised discussions about police brutality and issues of race.
That summer was when Fendley was first approached about opening a new coffee shop at Boise State. She opened the store on Sept. 4, 2020.
After Friday’s verdict, Duke left an area outside the courtroom where reporters had gathered without commenting.
“Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences,” Duke said during opening arguments in the trial. “The First Amendment protects everyone. It protects Fendley’s right to express her support for the thin blue line. It also supports, though, anyone’s right to not support Big City Coffee.”
Duke had said that administrators were aware of Fendley’s support for the thin blue line and the potential problems it could cause on campus before agreeing to the contract, and that it didn’t deter them — other vendors on campus, like Chick-fil-A, have had their own controversies. Likewise, Duke said Fendley “chose to come to campus knowing that the belief she has would be a problem for some people.”
During closing arguments Friday afternoon, Duke played back portions of a contentious meeting between university administrators and Fendley on Oct. 22, 2020, that ultimately ended with Big City Coffee shuttering its campus location after just 42 days in business. During the meeting, which Duke said was not about canceling Fendley’s contract but about about finding a path forward in the wake of a social media “firestorm,” Fendley made several comments about how she could take her resources downtown and do better.
Most of the meeting was secretly recorded by Estey, but the recording was inadvertently stopped before the meeting was over, according to Duke. The last 20 minutes or so were not recorded. The two sides have disputed what happened then.
Before the recording stops, Estey asks Fendley, “what would you like to see happen?” Fendley responds to say she’s “not going to stay in a place where we’re not going to be supported.”
“If you guys aren’t prepared to support Big City, you know, and stand up for it … then we’ll go, because it’s not worth it,” Fendley said.
Big City Coffee’s downtown location closed permanently earlier this month. Halfway through the nine-day trial, Fendley announced on the business’s Facebook page that she’s “had the time of my life” but would be “taking a break,” the Idaho Statesman reported. Caffeina Kitchen opened in its place.
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