Laguna Beach Urth Caffe countersues seven Muslim women who claimed discrimination

A civil rights lawsuit filed in April by seven Muslim women claiming they were targeted and humiliated when forced to leave Urth Caffé by management is fraudulent, an attorney for the Laguna Beach restaurant said in a brief filed Tuesday supporting a lawsuit countering the seven women for trespass.

The trespass claim followed a lawsuit filed by the women claiming they were subjected to religious discrimination when Urth Caffé staff, with assistance from Laguna Beach police officers, asked them to leave when the women refused to abide by the café’s seating policy.

Tuesday’s brief was filed by the American Freedom Law Center, a national public interest law firm retained by Urth Caffé.

“The underlying lawsuit claiming religious discrimination is a fraud and a hoax on the courts and the media,” said David Yerushalmi, AFLC co-founder and senior counsel. “It is nothing short of an abuse of process to extort public apologies and other accommodations from my client, Urth Caffé.”

A hearing on the motion is set for Nov. 22 at Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana. This will be the first time a judge will review details of the case.

Yerushalmi said Urth Caffé did not discriminate against the women. He said the claim that they were asked to leave the café because they were wearing hijabs – a traditional Middle Eastern headscarf – is laughable.

On the night of April 22, as on many Friday nights, a large number of young people, including a majority of whom are Muslim and of Arab descent, make up the base of Urth Caffé’s customers, Yerushalmi said.

“Not surprisingly, many of these customers are women wearing hijabs. None of these other Muslim women was asked to leave. The women who now claim victim status were not asked to leave, but only to abide by the café’s policy to give up their high-demand outside patio table after 45 minutes to allow other customers, including those wearing hijabs, to enjoy the experience. The women refused to abide by the policy and began causing a scene and disrupting other patrons. ... This is trespass plain and simple.”

The trespass countersuit claims the seven women were not victims, but instead the aggressors and guilty of trespass.

The women, represented by three attorneys, said at a press conference in April that they were singled out and told to leave Urth Caffé on April 22 because they appeared to be Muslim. Six of the seven wore hijabs.

One of their attorneys, Mohammad Tajsar, said at the time that Urth Caffé staff “targeted these women as a way of cleansing their location of women that appeared to be Muslim to appease the Islamaphobia in a predominantly white Laguna Beach community.”

“We vigorously deny they broke the trespass law because they followed the orders of the police,” he said in June. “We view their cross-complaint as a mechanism to question the motivation of the women who came to Urth Caffé to have a good time and a further attempt to scare them not to pursue their lawsuit.”

On Tuesday, Tajsar said the new filings by Urth Caffé are a response to a motion the women filed on Aug. 26 asking the judge to toss out the café’s counterclaim of trespass. The motion is a way to get an earlier hearing.

“We filed it because (their trespass claim) was an attempt to intimidate and silence plaintiffs,” Tajsar said Tuesday.

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