Screen capture via KTLA
A group of young Muslim women have filed a suit against a trendy California coffeehouse, accusing the employees of discrimination after the women were asked to leave the premises. The café owners have fired back with a countersuit for trespassing and abuse of process, according to Courthouse News.Urth Caffé locations in Southern California are often busy and located in upscale parts of town. In April, seven women, most in their 20s, wearing hijabs, met on the patio—described as an "in demand" location by management's countersuit—of Urth's Laguna Beach branch. Employees asked the women to leave the patio tables, citing a policy that customers must limit their table time to 45 minutes during busy hours."We told Tino [the employee] that our orders had just arrived and that we couldn't reasonably finish and leave within 10 minutes," the lead plaintiff, Sara Farsakh, wrote on her Facebook page. "He said it didn't matter and we had to leave." Farsakh's post includes videos and photos showing the less-than-bustling restaurant. She went on to write:
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Urth Caffé's attorney, David Yerushalmi, insists that the women's lawsuit is completely unjustified."[The cafe] has a policy that is legally enforced, and they've trained their employees to follow that policy," Yerushalmi said. According to Yerushalmi, the café is a popular nightspot for young Muslims. He also added that footage from security cameras shows that "other women wearing hijabs were there and not asked to leave."The women's attorney, Dan Stormer, argues that the café's actions were motivated by discrimination. Such actions are "exceptional in their commonness," Stormer told Broadly. "What is uncommon is that these women are willing to speak up. There is a fear, especially in the Muslim community, that you should just accept discrimination and deal with it rather that turning it into a major fight that brings some sort of bad spotlight on the Muslim community."In June, Yerushalmi countersued the women on behalf of the café for trespassing and "actual harm." He said that further lawsuits would be filed once the women's case is thrown out as "frivolous" and "without merit.""Everyone is afraid to be accused of bigotry or Islamophobia," Yerushlami said. "When you have President Obama on TV blasting anyone who criticizes any aspect of Islam, well, people are afraid of getting on the wrong side of that politically correct club."We asked Tino if he had asked any other parties to hurry up and leave. He replied that he was instructing anyone that had been there for over 45 minutes. The party on the table next to us (a group of white women) overheard our conversation and were shocked. They told us they had been sitting far longer than we had but had never been told to prepare to leave.