A pro-police coffee shop owner bullied off campus at Boise State University could be getting a large payout soon.
A jury awarded Big City Coffee $3 million following a lawsuit from owner Sarah Fendley against the public university.
The coffee shop left campus in 2020 following pushback from students who objected to Fendley’s (pictured above, right) shop supporting Thin Blue Line USA, a pro-police organization.
“Big City is very supportive of the Thin Blue Line which we know is not supportive of people of color,” Alyssa Wainaina, a student leader, said at a September 2020 Inclusive Excellence Student Council meeting. “I believe that they should have never been brought to campus and if it can be reversed it should be.”
IDEDNews.org reported on Friday:
After a nine-day jury trial, Sarah Jo Fendley prevailed over Alicia Estey, Boise State’s chief financial and operating officer and vice president for finance and operations, and Boise State President Marlene Tromp’s former chief of staff; and Leslie Webb, Boise State’s former vice president for student affairs and enrollment management. In her lawsuit, Fendley accused Estey and Webb of pushing Big City off campus in the fall of 2020 — in retaliation, said Fendley, for her vocal support of law enforcement.
The jury awarded Fendley a total of $3 million in damages for business losses, mental and emotional distress, personal humiliation and lost reputation. The jury also ruled Webb, now a University of Montana administrator, was liable for another $1 million in punitive damages.
“We’re very grateful,” Fendley’s attorney Mike Roe said Friday, according to the Idaho news outlet. “The system worked and we had a great jury and the clerk was great. Sarah got her day after all of these years. … We’re very pleased.”
The university plans to appeal.
The Fix interviewed Fendley ahead of the trial.
“BSU had spent, as I write this, over a million dollars on outside legal and PR to destroy me and muddy the waters of the simple truth,” she told The Fix in August. “They caved to a small group of students, the Inclusive Excellence Student Council, who were also paid w2 employees of the school and they had me removed…from campus for alleged racism by way of two facts- I have a sticker on my door downtown and second I had a policeman at home.”
She said she is not “anti-black” or a “racist.”
“That money should be spent on students,” she said. “Instead, that taxpayer money was spent on a lie.”
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Written by the staff reporters at The College Fix.
Photo “Sarah Fendley” by Sarah Fendley / The College Fix.