Oberlin College Loses Its Appeal
A court upholds a jury’s $50 million judgment against the Ohio school for defaming a local business.
By Thomas M. Boyd Wall Street JournalApril 1, 2022 2:05 pm ET
Gibson’s Bakery in Oberlin, Ohio.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the Ohio Court of Appeals handed down a long-awaited decision Thursday in the case of Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College. The court dismissed all of Oberlin’s appellate claims and confirmed the jury’s finding that the college, a small private liberal arts institution in rural Ohio, was liable for libel, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and intentional interference with a business relationship. It then upheld the trial jury’s award to Gibson’s Bakery of $11.1 million in compensatory damages, $33.2 million in punitive damages and $6.3 million in attorneys’ fees.When the original verdict was issued, Oberlin and much of the academic community, as evidenced by friend-of-the-court briefs filed in the case, generally hyperventilated, as though academic freedom were at stake. Carmen Twillie Ambar, Oberlin’s president, told a CBS reporter at the time that the jury had inappropriately held the college responsible for the exercise by its students of their First Amendment right to protest. She claimed that the proper question should have been “whether a college should be held liable for the speech of its students.” When confronted by the reporter with Gibson’s lawyer’s point that the First Amendment wasn’t at issue in the trial, she blithely replied that those claims were “misstating what the jury found.” In its ruling, the Court of Appeals agreed with Gibson.
On Nov. 9, 2016, three black Oberlin students walked into Gibson’s Bakery, a small, local, family-owned bakery and convenience store run by the Gibson family for more than 130 years. It also had a longstanding affiliation with the college, supplying students with daily breakfast fare. The son of the owner, Allyn Gibson, saw one of the students use a fake ID to purchase alcohol and then shoplift a bottle of wine. When confronted, the student fled the store, chased by Mr. Gibson in an attempt to apprehend him until police could arrive; the other two students immediately became involved, and all three were arrested.
That altercation put in motion a massive, organized student protest, with 200 to 300 people gathered outside the bakery. Students prepared a one-page flier that accused the bakery of having a history of “racial profiling and discrimination.” College administrators joined the students in handing out the flier to patrons of the bakery and passersby during the protest.
Among the administrators who participated in the protest was Meredith Raimondo, then dean of students. Ms. Raimondo was found to have passed out a flier to a reporter as well as “a large stack of fliers” to students to distribute. The Court of Appeals also noted that in 2017, after the three students pleaded guilty for their conduct the previous November, another college administrator, who attended the legal proceedings, sent a text to Ms. Raimondo stating that “this is the most egregious process” and that “I hope we rain fire and brimstone on that store.”
After the college newspaper published a letter from a retired professor critical of the college’s “handling of the Gibson matter,” the court recounted that Ms. Raimondo then sent a text message to another administrator stating: “F-him. I’d say unleash the students if I wasn’t convinced this needs to be put behind us.” The court cited this example and a litany of others to demonstrate the myriad ways by which Oberlin College aided and abetted both the publication of defamatory material and the continuing damage to Gibson’s Bakery.
Judging from the evidence unearthed at the trial and reiterated by the appellate court, it seems too many academics view their “mission” of encouraging students to express their political opinions to include actively participating in what can sometimes be, as in this case, the publication of false and defamatory material. This participation went so far that, in her testimony, Ms. Raimondo admitted instructing a subordinate to tell the supplier of food to Oberlin’s dining halls to stop supplying food to students from the bakery in what the appeals court called “a claimed effort to appease the angry students.”
The appellate judges held that while the trial court had properly found that “the student chants and verbal protests about the Gibsons being racists were protected by the First Amendment,” what separated Oberlin and placed it in a financial vise was the active, irresponsible and defamatory actions of several of its senior administrators. Rather than try to resolve the matter early on or use the resulting guilty pleas as a lesson, Oberlin actively sought to punish Gibson’s Bakery for having a different perspective, for standing by the arrest of the three Oberlin students, and for exercising its right of legal redress.
Fifty million dollars is a stiff price to pay for promoting what a jury and four judges found were false and defamatory accusations against a neighbor. Maybe this result will serve to remind other academic institutions that their vicious politics can have consequences.
