‘It is not a close question’
Yvette Felarca is not having a good year.
The middle school teacher and Berkeley Antifa leader was ordered to pay the legal costs of a former College Republicans official for a bad-faith restraining order, and now she’s lost her legal battle to prevent the school district from releasing her records to a conservative organization.
The weakness of her argument was evident in the concise order denying Felarca’s motion for summary judgment, issued by U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria Oct. 19:
The disclosure of the documents in question would not violate the plaintiffs’ First Amendment of Fourth Amendment rights. It is not a close question.
He also dismissed her lawsuit against the Berkeley United School District because it has 11th Amendment immunity as a state agency, and refused to exercise “supplemental jurisdiction” over her remaining claims.
Felarca is no stranger to controversy. She became a target of conservative groups after she took credit for shutting down a planned event with anti-feminist provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California-Berkeley.
A petition demanded the school district fire her after she was caught on video assaulting a man at a white nationalist rally. She was arrested for that act more than a year later.
MORE: Felarca ordered to pay court costs for College Republicans leader
Felarca’s legal attempt to Judicial Watch from obtaining records related to her activism faced a stinging rebuke in Chhabria’s court in early October, when the Obama appointee previewed the order he would later release, according to the conservative group’s account of the hearing.
Similar to its other cases, Judicial Watch had filed a California Public Relations Act to obtain records about Felarca’s “violent Antifa activism.” Specifically, it wanted her school district personnel file and all emails by district and school staff that mentioned her name, “antifa” and her protest group and its acronym.
Felarca argued that Judicial Watch was misusing the law for “political means” and called its request “illegal,” though the conservative group claimed its request “aligns perfectly with California law.”
Regarding her argument that an approved request would let employers and political groups “spy” on public employees and police their speech, the judge called it “entirely frivolous” in the hearing, according to Judicial Watch.
The conservative group said this was the first time a third party had sued to stop an agency – in this case, the school district – from turning over records to the group, and the first time it’s been required to “litigate a state public records act lawsuit in a federal court.”
Judicial Watch deemed it “a huge victory for the public’s right to information about government and the taxpayer-funded officials that operate it.”
Felarca told Berkeleyside that the order undermined the “free speech, free association and privacy” of teachers and support staff: “Right-wing trolls should not be able to use the cover of the legal system to harass teachers, support staff and families in the public schools.”
The school district claimed it had already spent “hundreds of hours of staff time” fulfilling the Judicial Watch request, distracting them from “educating our children.”
After Felarca was arrested for using violence at the 2016 rally, she claimed that “standing up [to] fascism” is “not a crime.”
The initial restraining order she filed against the former president of the Berkeley College Republicans, Troy Worden, “restricted his 1st and 2nd Amendment rights and ‘made it difficult’ for him to walk around campus to attend his classes,” he claimed in the lawsuit against Felarca.
Read the order and Judicial Watch statement.
MORE: Beating up suspected white nationalist is ‘not a crime,’ Felarca says
MORE: Demands grow to fire teacher who beat up white nationalist
IMAGE: Tucker Carlson Tonight / YouTube
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