A civil rights lawsuit filed last month by seven Muslim women claiming they were targeted and humiliated when forced to leave Urth Caffe by management is fraudulent, the owner of the Laguna Beach restaurant said in a counter-suit filed Wednesday.
“It is nothing short of an abuse of process to extort public apologies and other accommodations from my client, Urth Caffe,” said David Yerushalmi, co-founder and senior counsel for American Freedom Law Center, a national public interest law firm.
The cross-complaint filed in Orange County Superior Court alleges the lawsuit by the women is an abuse of process. The counter-suit accuses the women of trespassing at the cafe after being asked to leave.
Yerushalmi said in the suit that the restaurant staff was enforcing a policy that guests cannot exceed 45 minutes at a table without ordering when the cafe is busy. The women, who had pulled together three tables at the front patio, refused requests by cafe managers to share one table, or to move to the side of the patio or inside the restaurant, the lawsuit said.
The women became argumentative and insisted they would not leave the cafe even though they had not been asked to leave, the suit claims. They were eventually escorted out of the restaurant by Laguna Beach police.
The women, represented by three attorneys, said at a press conference in April that they were singled out and told to leave Urth Caffe on April 22 because they appeared to be Muslim. Six wore hijabs – a traditional headscarf in the Middle East.
One of their attorneys, Mohammad Tajsar, said at the time that Urth Caffe 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.”
Tajsar said Wednesday that he has started to review the cross-complaint that alleges trespass on the part of the women.
“We vigorously deny they broke the trespass law because they followed the orders of the police,” he said. “We view their cross-complaint as a mechanism to question the motivation of the women who came to Urth Caffe to have a good time and a further attempt to scare them not to pursue their lawsuit.”
Shallom Berkman, who is Jewish and co-owns Urth Caffe, disputed those claims. He said his wife, Jilla Berkman, who is Muslim, was the one who advised management to call police after the women became rude toward restaurant staff.
“Shallom and Jilla are defending the character of this really neat cafe and its employees,” Yerushalmi said. “They’re incensed their employees were called bigots.”
The lawsuit said a security guard was sent to talk to the women after they “continued to act disruptively and publicly refused to abide by the policy.” The women refused to move from their tables and began to videotape the cafe and its clientele without permission, the lawsuit said.
Laguna Beach police were called in to assist and usher the women out of the cafe.
Yerushalmi said Urth Caffe is popular and successful due in large measure to its young Muslim clientele.
“The claim that these women were asked to leave the cafe because they were wearing hijabs is laughable,” he said. “That night, as every Friday night, a large number of young people, including a majority of whom are Muslim and of Arab descent, make up the base of Urth Caffe’s customers. Not surprisingly, many of these customers are women wearing hijabs. None of these other Muslim women was asked to leave.”