A Boise coffee shop owner’s lawsuit against Boise State University has finally gone to trial in Ada County Court.
Big City Coffee owner Sarah Fendley sued Boise State in 2021 for $10 million after her campus store closed just a month or so after opening the year before. The case centers on a contentious meeting between Fendley and administrators in 2020 that ultimately ended with Big City Coffee closing its campus location after 42 days in business.
Fendley’s attorney, Michael Roe, said during his opening statement in court Thursday that Fendley was thrown off campus to appease a group of students who disagreed with her pro-police views and her support for the thin blue line.
“My client was sacrificed,” Roe said.
According to Boise State District Attorney Keely Duke, it was Fendley who chose to terminate the contract with the campus after administrators remained neutral in the dispute.
“We’re all here because Fendley demanded special treatment, and Alicia Estey and Leslie Webb said no,” Duke said. “They can’t use the student code of conduct as a weapon to punish students for expressing opinions that you don’t like.”
The case now centers on two individual defendants: Estey, then Boise State’s vice president for university affairs and now promoted to chief financial officer and chief operating officer, and Webb, the university’s former vice president for student affairs.
The dispute stems from a social media post Fendley made on Oct. 21, 2020, after she emailed a screenshot of a private Snapchat story from a Boise State student. The student criticized Big City Coffee’s support for the Thin Blue Line. Fendley responded to the screenshot in her own public Facebook and Instagram posts.
Fendley has openly expressed her support for the police both online and in her city centre shop, where a thin blue flag measuring 3 by 5 inches hangs by the door.
The Thin Blue Line — a movement to support police — is embodied by a black-and-white American flag with a single horizontal blue stripe. The flags have gained popularity as the U.S. has seen growing calls for police reform following the May 2020 death of George Floyd. Floyd, a Black man, was killed by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, a white man. His final words, “I can’t breathe,” captured on video, sparked a wave of Black Lives Matter protests that have rocked the country for months, sparking discussions about police brutality and race.
In court, Fendley, in response to a question from her attorney, said she would not support the thin blue line if she believed it was racist, adding that she voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.
Still, Fendley says she has long been a supporter of law enforcement.
In court, she said that as a young girl in the small town of New Plymouth, Idaho, she had an abusive father. She recalled that he had given her mother a black eye when she was in kindergarten. She turned to the police, and the help she received from two officers shaped her relationship with law enforcement.
Perhaps even more influential, she hinted, was her relationship with her former fiancé, Kevin Holtry. A Boise police officer, Holtry was paralyzed from the waist down in 2016 after a shootout with a fugitive in Boise County Courthouse. Holtry’s partner, Brian Holland, killed the fugitive, the Idaho Statesman reported. Holtry, who is no longer a police officer, is listed as a witness in the lawsuit.
Fendley and Holtry both attended Boise State.
Social media post leads to lawsuit
On Snapchat, the student shared that he originally supported a local business in the space on campus that used to be Starbucks, but that he no longer supports Big City Coffee after discovering the business supports the “thin blue line.”
The student encouraged others not to visit the store if they “truly support and love” their BIPOC colleagues. BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous, and people of color.
“I remember feeling defeated,” Fendley testified Thursday. “I said, ‘OK, I’m going to deal with it.’ I always deal with these kinds of things when they come up.”
In her post, Fendley shared details about the shooting that left Holtry paralyzed, even including a photo of him.
The post appeared the next morning, on Oct. 22, 2020, in a class that Boise State President Marlene Tromp was teaching. Though Fendley had cropped the screenshot so that the student’s name did not appear, Duke said some students were concerned about possible doxxing, which refers to when a person’s identifying information, such as an address, phone number or name, is maliciously posted online, according to dictionary.com.
“They were angry that a business owner would respond in this way to a single Snapchat with a group of students,” Duke said.
A few hours after class, a student filed a complaint with the university, Duke said.
Fendley said her contact at the university, Nicole Nimmons, who is not named in the lawsuit, called her to inform her that the post had caused a “firestorm.”
“This storm of protest increased pressure on the defendants to remove Big City Coffee from campus,” Roe said.
Fendley was called to a hasty meeting with university administrators, which her attorney said was a “critical” event in the case. Nimmons was not allowed to attend the meeting, Fendley said.
Owner says university terminated contract
Attorneys for both sides offered opposing views Thursday about what happened during the meeting, much of which was secretly recorded by Estey. But the recording was accidentally stopped before the meeting was over. The final 20 minutes or so, which Roe claims
Seven people were present, including Fendley, Holtry, Estey, Webb and Brian Holzworth, a representative of Aramark, a food stand on campus.
Duke said university administrators had set up the meeting “to discuss the difficulties they were facing and how they could work together.” Duke said Fendley assumed Boise State would use the student code of conduct to suppress students who disagreed with her. Fendley, however, said she did not ask for the student to be disciplined. She said she wanted the university’s support.
During the meeting, Webb told Fendley that “that’s not going to happen,” Roe said. He also alleged that in the days following the meeting, Boise State administrators twice asked Fendley to sign a statement saying the departure was mutual. Fendley refused both times, he said.
The store closed just four days later, on October 26, 2020.
Roe and Fendley said the university terminated Fendley’s contract because of her support for the police. Roe said the removal violated her First Amendment right to free speech.
Duke said the university never asked Fendley to stop supporting the Thin Blue Line or to remove her post.
She also 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 did not deter them. Duke also said that Fendley “chose to come to campus knowing that the beliefs that she has would be a problem for some people.”
“Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences,” Duke said. “The First Amendment protects everyone. It protects Fendley’s right to show her support for the Thin Blue Line. But it also protects everyone’s right not to support Big City Coffee.”
Roe said Fendley took out a $125,000 loan to invest in supplies and equipment for the campus location — costs she was unable to recoup. He said the university’s actions also damaged her reputation and personal relationships.
The initial charges in the lawsuit against the university and administrators in their official capacity were previously dismissed, because the 11th Amendment prohibits lawsuits against the state, which represented the university and its officials. Other charges involving the Idaho Constitution, Idaho law or contractual issues were also dismissed. But much of the lawsuit was allowed to proceed.
The jury trial is expected to last nine days over three weeks. District Judge Cynthia Yee-Wallace is presiding over the case.
Jury selection filters out pro-police and anti-police sentiments
Yee-Wallace whittled down a group of fewer than 100 potential jurors during a jury selection process on Wednesday, where Roe questioned the group about what bumper stickers they had on their cars, what flags they had hanging in front of their houses and what yard signs they had in front of their homes. There was also a show of hands for anyone who owned a small business or was in the military.
During that trial, Duke asked jurors if they thought Black Lives Matter and the thin blue line were equivalent concepts. She drew on the social and political climate of the summer of 2020, when Fendley was approached to open a new store at Boise State.
“What was going on at the time? Other than, of course, Covid,” she said. “We had George Floyd. We had protests. We had Black Lives Matter. Those are the kinds of social issues that are being discussed in this case.”
Juror #43 said they didn’t think the case would be right for them.
“If I saw her coffee shop with the blue Lives Matter sticker in the window, I would walk away,” the juror said. “I’ve supported Black Lives Matter in the past, both by helping out and financially. I don’t think this is somewhere I could walk into without bias.”
Yee-Wallace thanked the judges for their fairness and released them from the jury.
Another person in the jury pool said her father was a Boise police officer and she had a thin blue bumper sticker. She also did not make the jury.
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