A coffee shop owner in Boise, Idaho just won a $4 million judgment against Boise State University. She had claimed that the school forced her to close the shop after a controversy erupted over her support for police. 

Sarah Fendley opened Big City Coffee on the campus of Boise State in 2020. In the window of her store was a small "thin blue line" sticker to symbolize her support for police officers. Students noticed the sticker and one wrote a message on her Snapchat account asking fellow students not to visit. Fendley was sent a copy of the message and decided to address it directly on social media.

“I remember feeling defeated,” Fendley testified on Thursday. “I said, ‘OK, I’m going to address it.’ I always address these things when they come up.”

In her post, Fendley talked about what the thin blue line means to her and shared details about the shooting that left Holtry paralyzed. She even attached a photo of him.

The post came up the following morning, on Oct. 22, 2020, in a class Boise State President Marlene Tromp was teaching. While Fendley had cropped the screenshot to not include the student’s name, Duke said some students were concerned about possible doxxing...

Kevin Holtry is a former Boise PD officer who was paralyzed from the waist down in 2016 when he was shot by a suspect in a gunfight. In 2017, Fendley and Holtry were engaged. It's not clear from the story if they ever got married but Fendley raised the story to explain one of the reasons why she supported the police.

As for the doxxing claim, there was never anything to that from what I can tell. One thing about student activists is that they lie a lot, especially in an effort to make themselves look like victims.

In any case, Fendley's response created a firestorm on campus and she was called into a meeting with a bunch of university administrators. Part of that conversation was apparently recorded by one of the administrators, but not the conclusion of it. So the lawyers for each side told different stories about how the meeting ended. 

Fendley claimed the university terminated her contract because of her support for police, a move her lawyer said clearly violated her free speech rights. Hours before the meeting started, administrators were working on a press release about the business leaving campus, Fendley’s attorney Michael Roe said, making it clear they had a single outcome in mind.

“Senior administration at BSU caved to a very small number of student activists,” Roe told Fox News Digital.

The university and their lawyer claimed they never forced Fendley to close but that she made that decision on her own.

On Friday, Estey took the stand as the last witness before closing argument. 

"We didn't retaliate against her at all," she said. "She made a choice to leave which was her choice to make, there was no retaliation."

What's not in dispute is that four days after the meeting, Big City Coffee closed, just months after it opened. Fendley was out tens of thousands of dollars she had spent opening the business with no way to earn the money back. In 2021 she sued the school for $10 million. Portions of the original case were dropped but clearly the jury agreed that the university was at fault. Their deliberations only lasted about 3 hours so it seems they didn't feel the defense had much of a case.

Fendley was awarded $3 million "for lost business, reputational damage, mental and emotional distress and personal humiliation." An additional $1 million in punitive damages was directed against the school's then vice president of student affairs.

This case is very reminiscent of another one that happened in 2016 across the street from Oberlin College. Gibson's Bakery was accused of racism after stopping a black student who was shoplifting bottles of wine from the store. That student eventually pleaded guilty but a woke mob on campus decided to punish the store and received assistance from campus administrators who also stopped doing business with the bakery. The bakery sued and won a large judgment. The school appealed and lost. They were eventually ordered to pay Gibson's Bakery $32 million plus interest for a total of $36 million.

The Gibson's Bakery case was dragged out by Oberlin for years so it could be a while before the Boise State case is finally resolved. Still, it sounds as if the jury felt this was a pretty clear case. Hopefully the appeals court will accept their judgment.