Lib College Tries To Start Its Own Baker Controversy, Gets Slapped with $11 Mil. Judgment
Ohio’s Oberlin College decided to take a page out of the left’s anti-bakery handbook in an effort to drum up its own controversy with a local shop.
Launching a politically correct fight against a bakery didn’t work out well for liberals in Colorado, and it’s not going so well in Ohio either.
Now, after two long years, a verdict has finally been reached in the Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College case.
A jury last week awarded $11 million to the Gibson family, sending a powerful statement to self-righteous colleges around the country.
Cornell Law Professor William Jacobson, writing at Legal Insurrection, summarized the entire process perfectly, having reported on the story from the initial protests to the jury’s decision.
“The verdict sends a strong message that colleges and universities cannot simply wind up and set loose student social justice warriors and then wash their hands of the consequences,” Jacobson wrote.
“In this case, a wholly innocent 5th-generation bakery was falsely accused of being racist and having a history 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,” he concluded.
On Friday, bakery owner David Gibson and his son, Allyn W. Gibson, addressed the media. David Gibson said he was thrilled that this lawsuit could be put behind him and his family, who look forward to the future.
“I don’t want to be afraid to even work there anymore,” he said, according to the Elyria, Ohio, Chronicle-Telegram. “I just want this to send the message so that we can enjoy our community and the business that we’ve had for all these generations.”
Allyn added that he’s hoping the bakery and his family’s way of life can return to normal.
“People (were too) scared to come in. It’s hard to believe it could get that way in a small town,” he said, according to the Chronicle-Telegram.
Below is a video of comments made by the bakery owners and their legal team after the victory:
The central issue around the lawsuit was Oberlin College’s reaction to the arrests made at the Gibson’s shop.
The school, which did business with the Gibsons, didn’t wait for the guilty pleas of the three black students, who admitted to attempting to steal alcohol as underage individuals.
Oberlin College wrongly decided that the best course of action was to pour gasoline on the fire.
Meredith Raimondo, Oberlin College dean of students, allegedly participated in the protests, handing out flyers that attacked the bakery, Legal Insurrection reported.
The Oberlin College Student Senate passed a resolution against the Gibson’s, claiming the bakery had “a long history of racial profiling and discriminatory treatment of students and residents alike,” according to Legal Insurrection.
The college’s administration promoted this resolution by the student senate, according to Legal Insurrection.
The verdict comes nearly a year after the United States Supreme Court issued a 7-2 ruling in favor of a Colorado baker Jack Phillips. In 2012, Phillips refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple at his bakery, ultimately opening up the floodgates for the hateful, litigious spirit of some on the left.
Six years later, Phillips emerged victorious in a grueling, drawn-out fight against slander, lies and character assassination — not unlike what the Gibson family endured before Friday’s verdict.
Despite its many attempts to tear down the Gibson family, Oberlin’s reactive attacks have all fallen by the wayside as the justice system followed through once again.
Now Oberlin has an $11 million bill to pay, which could go higher if the jury awards punitive damages in a second phase of the trial, according to The Washington Post.
And leftists should be learning that local bakeries are not to be trifled with.
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