What the thin blue line has to do with a coffee shop’s lawsuit against Boise State

A Boise coffee shop owner’s lawsuit against Boise State University has finally made it to trial in an Ada County courtroom.

Big City Coffee owner Sarah Fendley sued Boise State for $10 million after her campus shop closed in October 2020, a month and a half after opening next to the university’s library. The case revolves around a contentious meeting between Fendley and administrators that ultimately ended with Big City Coffee shuttering its campus location after just 42 days in business.

Fendley’s attorney, Michael Roe of Givens Pursley, said Thursday during opening statements that Fendley was forced off of campus to appease a group of students who disagreed with her pro-police views and her support of the thin blue line, the idea that police form the line between order and lawlessness.

“My client was sacrificed,” Roe said.

Boise State’s attorney, Keely Duke of Duke Evett, said that it was Fendley who chose to terminate the campus contract after administrators remained neutral as Fendley sought their support in the dispute.

“We are all here because Sarah Fendley demanded special treatment, and she was told no by Alicia Estey and Leslie Webb,” Duke said. “They cannot weaponize the student code of conduct to punish students for expressing opinions you do not like.”

Fendley cites relationship with ex-Boise police officer

The case has honed in on two individual defendants — 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; and Webb, the university’s former vice president of student affairs.

The conflict stems from a post Fendley made on social media Oct. 21, 2020, after she was emailed a screenshot of a Boise State student’s private Snapchat story. The student criticized Big City Coffee’s support of the thin blue line.

Fendley addressed the screenshot in her own public Facebook and Instagram posts. 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.

The black-and-white American flag has one horizontal blue stripe. 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.

In court, in response to a question from her attorney, Fendley said she wouldn’t support the thin blue line if she thought it was racist. She added that she voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.

Fendley said she’s been a longtime supporter of law enforcement. She said from the witness stand that as a young girl in the small town of New Plymouth in western Idaho’s Payette County, she had an abusive father. She recalled him giving her mother a black eye when she was in kindergarten. She turned to the police, and the help she received from two officers went on to shape her relationship with law enforcement.

Perhaps even more influential, she alluded, was her relationship with her former fiance, Kevin Holtry. As a Boise police officer, Holtry became paralyzed from the waist down in 2016 after a gunfight with a fugitive on the Boise Bench. Holtry’s partner, Brian Holland, killed the fugitive, and the two are now “like brothers,” Fendley said.

Fendley and Holtry became engaged about a year after the shooting. They both previously attended Boise State. Holtry, who is no longer with the Boise Police Department, is listed as a witness in the lawsuit.

Social media post spurs ‘firestorm’

On Snapchat, the student said that while they originally supported having a local business in the space on campus that was previously occupied by a Starbucks store, they no longer supported Big City Coffee after discovering that the business supports the thin blue line.

The student encouraged others not to patronize the shop if they “truly support and love” their BIPOC peers. BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous and people of color. Duke said during opening arguments that while a small number of students were upset about Big City Coffee being on campus, there were no organized protests, marches or boycotts of the shop.

Duke said Fendley saw the Snapchat post and went “into a frenzy,” emailing Boise State to say it was disappointing and that she felt the student code of conduct had been violated. She asked the university to address it.

“I remember feeling defeated,” Fendley testified on Thursday. “I said, ‘OK, I’m going to address it.’”

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

The post came up the following morning, on Oct. 22, 2020, in a class that Boise State President Marlene Tromp was teaching. While Fendley had cropped the screenshot to omit the student’s name, Duke, the lawyer representing Boise State, said some students were concerned about possible doxxing. Doxxing is when a person’s identifying information, such as an address, phone number or name, is maliciously posted online, according to dictionary.com .

“They were upset that this is how a business owner would respond to a single Snapchat with a group of students,” Duke said.

A couple of hours after the class, a student lodged a complaint about Fendley with the university, Duke said.

Fendley said her point of contact at the university, Nicole Nimmons, who is not named in the lawsuit, called to tell her that the post had created a “firestorm.” The university said the firestorm was on social media. But Fendley decided to close the campus shop for the day out of fear for her employees’ safety.

She was called into a hasty meeting with university administrators that her attorney said was a “critical” event in the case. Nimmons was not allowed in the meeting, according to Fendley.

“I was completely blindsided,” Fendley said. “I had no idea there was any situation brewing.”

Roe, her lawyer, said the “firestorm” increased pressure on Boise State to remove Big City Coffee from campus. But Duke, the attorney for Boise State, said the meeting was not arranged to kick the shop off of campus.

Owner says university ended contract

Attorneys shared opposing views of what occurred during the meeting, most of which was secretly recorded by Estey, the vice president of university affairs. But the recording was inadvertently stopped before the meeting was over, Duke said. The last 20 minutes or so were not recorded. The two sides dispute what happened then.

Seven people attended the meeting, including Fendley, Holtry, Estey, Webb and Brian Holzworth, a representative for Aramark, a food vendor on campus.

Duke said the university administrators set up the meeting “to discuss the difficulties they were navigating and how to work together.” She said Fendley seemed to assume Boise State would use the student code of conduct to suppress the students who disagreed with her. But Duke said the school had a duty not to take sides.

Fendley, on the other hand, said she didn’t ask for the student to be disciplined. She said she wanted the university to support her the way other vendors on campus have been supported. She did not elaborate Thursday as to what kind of support she had been looking for.

During the meeting, in response to Fendley’s pleas for support, Webb told Fendley “that’s not going to happen,” according to Roe.

He alleged that in the days following the meeting, Boise State administrators twice asked Fendley to join a statement saying the departure was mutual. Fendley declined both times, he said.

Duke claimed that Fendley said in the meeting that she wouldn’t stay if she didn’t feel supported, and that she threatened to “take her resources downtown and do better.” Duke said emails between Fendley and the university show that since coming to campus, Fendley had complained about business being slow and about struggling to make payroll.

The shop closed on Oct. 26, 2020, four days after the meeting.

Roe and Fendley allege the university terminated Fendley’s contract because of her support for police. Roe said the removal was a violation of her First Amendment right to free speech.

Duke said Estey and Webb never told Fendley to stop supporting the thin blue line or to delete her post.

“They did not retaliate against her,” Duke said. “It didn’t happen.”

She said 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.”

“Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences,” Duke said. “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.”

Roe said Fendley had taken out a $125,000 loan to invest in supplies and equipment for the campus location — costs she’s been unable to recoup. He said the university’s actions also damaged her reputation and personal relationships.

Fendley and Holtry are no longer engaged.

Initial counts in the lawsuit against the university and administrators in their official capacities were previously dismissed, because the 11th Amendment bars suits 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.

Jury selection weeds out biases toward social issues

District Judge Cynthia Yee-Wallace trimmed down a pool of fewer than 100 potential jurors during jury selection Wednesday.

Roe questioned the pool about what bumper stickers they had on their cars, what flags they fly in front of their homes and what yards signs they might have on their lawns. There was also a show of hands for anyone who owns a small business or is in the military.

Duke asked the potential jurors whether they thought Black Lives Matter and the thin blue line were equal concepts. She drew upon the social and political climate of the summer of 2020, when Fendley was first approached about opening a new shop at Boise State.

“What was going on in that time? Other than, of course, Covid,” she said. “We had George Floyd. We had protests. We had Black Lives Matter. Those are the types of social issues at issue in this case.”

Juror No. 43 said they didn’t think the case would be a good fit for them.

“If I saw her coffee shop with the blue lives matter sticker in the window, I would walk away from it,” the juror said. “I’ve supported Black Lives Matter in the past, both as just helping out and also financially. I don’t think this is something where I could walk into it without being biased.”

Yee-Wallace thanked the juror for being honest and excused them from the jury pool.

Another person in the jury pool said her father was a Boise police officer and that she had a thin blue line bumper sticker. She didn’t make it onto the jury, either.

The 14 jurors selected include eight women and six men. Among them is a union plumber and pipefitter who has worked on Micron’s big fab-construction project in Southeast Boise. Another is a housekeeping manager at a local hotel. One juror said she was 35 weeks pregnant and set to be induced the week after the trial is set to finish. Two of the jurors are young Black men.

The trial is expected to last nine days over three weeks.

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