A jury has ordered Oberlin College to pay $11 million in damages to a family bakery on its campus that was falsely accused of racial profiling and faced months of student protests.
The bakery, called Gibson’s Bakery, has operated on campus since 1885 and had a business relationship with the school until November 2017, when the bakery sued the school for numerous offenses, including libel, slander, and interference with business relationships.
The conflict started in November 2016, the day after President Donald Trump’s election, after a black male student was stopped for shoplifting. He and two of his female peers eventually pleaded guilty to shoplifting and aggravated trespassing, but the damage to Gibson’s Bakery was already done.
Students accused the business of racial profiling, organized protests outside of its storefront, and distributed flyers on campus that accused the bakery of having “a long account of racial profiling and discrimination.”
On Friday, an Ohio jury ordered the college to pay $11 million in damages to the bakery for siding with the student protesters.
“The verdict sends a strong message that colleges and universities cannot simply wind up and let loose student social justice warriors and then wash their hands of the consequences,” said Cornell Law Professor and Legal Insurrection CEO William Jacobson. “In this case, a wholly innocent 5th-generation bakery was falsely accused of being racist and having a history of racial profiling after stopping three black Oberlin College students from shoplifting. The students eventually pleaded guilty, but not before large protests and boycotts intended to destroy the bakery and defame the owners. The jury appears to have accepted that Oberlin College facilitated the wrongful conduct against the bakery.”
Jacobson pointed out that there will be a punitive damages hearing on Tuesday, which could triple the $11 million award to $33 million.
“I’m at a loss for words,” David Gibson told Legal Insurrection after the verdict was read. “Two-and-a-half years of putting up with this has been very difficult and overwhelming. I just want to let people know across the country that this can happen to anyone else, but we stayed and worked together as a family and fought against this. In many ways, what we wanted from Oberlin College the jury gave to us. They said we were not racists and that the college should have said so when all this started.”
But the college continues to stand by its treatment of Gibson’s Bakery, and said in a statement Friday afternoon that it’s “disappointed with the verdict” and regrets “that the jury did not agree with the clear evidence our team presented.”
“As we have stated, colleges cannot be held liable for the independent actions of their students,” the college said. “Institutions of higher education are obligated to protect freedom of speech on their campuses and respect their students’ decision to peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights. Oberlin College acted in accordance with these obligations.”
Lee Plakas, one of the attorneys representing Gibson’s Bakery, told Legal Insurrection that the verdict represents a “national tipping point.”
“What the jury saw is that teaching students and having them learn how to be upstanding members of the community is what colleges are supposed to do,” said Plakas. “People around the country should learn from this, that you can use the legal system to right the wrongs, even if the one doing the wrong is some huge institution who thinks they can do anything they want.”
– – –
Anthony Gockowski is managing editor of Battleground State News, The Ohio Star, and The Minnesota Sun. Follow Anthony on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
