A university in Ohio is to pay $36.6 million to a local bakery after students and staff falsely accused it of racism because an employee chased and restrained a black student he had seen shoplifting. The Times has the story.
On Thursday Oberlin College’s board of trustees said it would pay damages awarded by the Ohio Court of Appeals, ending a five-year dispute that triggered a nationwide debate over race, criminal justice and free speech. The court upheld a jury verdict that Oberlin was liable for libel, intentional infliction of emotional distress and interference with a business.
Oberlin College students staged demonstrations outside Gibson’s Bakery in November 2016 a day after three black students were arrested and accused of attempting to steal from the store. Allyn Gibson, a grandson of the owner, said he saw one of the students, a young man, hiding two bottles of wine in his coat. Gibson chased him across the street and tackled him. Two young female students then attacked Gibson, according to a police officer.
All three students were arrested and later pleaded guilty to misdemeanour charges. At his sentencing Jonathan Aladin, who pleaded guilty to attempted theft, read a statement acknowledging that Gibson was justified in trying to restrain him and that his actions had not been racially motivated.
However, his initial arrest, which came the day after Donald Trump was elected president, caused outrage on a campus with a long, proud history of progressive activism. Students and staff believed the trio had been attempting to purchase alcohol under-age with fake identification.
If only every piece of woke defamation and attempt at cancellation could be so successfully litigated.
Worth reading in full.
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They should move that Bakery out of there. The university will not stop at anything to get revenge.
Just as Democrat municipalities are finding out, if you do not enforce basic law and order then the businesses pack up and leave, and your left with an empty wasteland.
Mississippi Shrinking – Taki’s Magazine – Taki’s Magazine (takimag.com)
A very revealing article, ToF. If you go onto Google Earth and take a ‘Street View’ trip through some of these cities, they are hardly vibrant. Maybe they were taken at odd times of day, but I get a picture of a bleak empty, dangerous heartland in the US, abandoned due to drugs and violence, but still with their cityscapes and public buildings in place so it gives it a surreal air. Feels soulless and tired. This is clearly a trend in the US. It’s as if they have decided to abandon their own country.
Equally disturbing is the fact that a so-called University is turning out students who do not understand the basics of law and order. Furthermore, and making matters worse, their interpretation of decent behaviour and what constitutes such is twisted around skin colour – good man black, even when he’s stealing and white man bad, even though the youth was acting decently and bravely in seeking to uphold proper societal standards ie knicking a thief.
Clearly this “University” needs a period of long hard reflection…
. ..before going back to the carp it has always spouted.
That works out at $13K per student, although the university has a $1bn endowment so they will barely notice it.
That’s probably going to happen: They’ll pay this easily using other people’s money and continue as if it never happened, counting on most of their victims being more easily cowed or at all incapable of taking the legal course of action.
According to the university they won’t even need to touch the endowment.
Trying to intimidate business owners into tolerating the actions of university-based shoplifting gangs is not my idea of progressive activism and certainly not something to be proud of.
This college should really use its loaf and figure out whether they want to be paying out millions or they’ll end up toast. It sounds like a crumby way to proceed. They should kiss and make up…say it with flours…