The accused slanderers still serving on Denver’s Board of Education.
Click for details about each.

Fight! Fight! Fight! Kristen Fry, a parent in Denver, has now sued the four members of the Denver school board who teamed up with a political consultant they worked with to falsely accuse her of assaulting that political consultant at a public board meeting while also using a vicious racial slur against him.

Fry had been part of a group of parents and teachers that were desperately trying to get this board to change its policies in the schools that had were allowing violence to run rampant From Fry’s lawsuit [pdf]

In the period leading up to 2022-23 school year, the BOE [Board of Education] defendants pursued a number of significant changes to DPS [Denver Public Schools] policy that had severe consequences for the educational and safety environment in DPS schools.

Among other things, in an initiative spearheaded by Mr. Anderson, and supported by the other defendants, DPS removed public safety officers from district schools because of purported racial inequities in disciplinary enforcement. DPS further replaced clear behavioral and accountability rules with what are sometimes termed “restorative justice” principles that often have the effect of leaving students (especially low-income students) vulnerable to disruptive and even criminal behavior by their classmates. For example, under the new rules, schools were required to allow potentially violent students, including students facing criminal charges such as robbery and attempted murder, to attend in person, even where against the advice of law enforcement authorities.

These policies were doing nothing but bring chaos and violence to the schools, while seriously degrading the learning environment. The parents, teachers, and even students repeatedly attempted in private and in public to convince the board its policies were not working.

In every case, this effort was met with anger, disrespect, and retailation by the board. In one case the board immediately terminated a principal for expressing dissent about their policies to a television news reporter. In the case of Fry, these thugs not only repeated these false claims against her in many public forums, they teamed up to file criminal charges against her.

Because of the charges brought by them, the Denver public school system banned Fry from being a volunteer in the schools, and the court also banned her from attending all board meetings, essentially denying her the right to use her first amendment rights.

The problem was that their claims were utterly false and downright slanders, as quickly proven when surveillance footage of that board meeting clearly showed that Fry never assaulted anyone. Once this footage was seen, the district attorney immediately dropped all charges against Fry.

Her reputation however remains soiled by the false slanders and accusations, and because of this she has enlisted the non-profit legal firm Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF) to defend her. Her lawsuit names the Denver Public School system, but it also names as defendants the four board members who defamed her — Auton’tai Anderson, Scott Esserman, Xochitl Gaytan, Michelle Quattlebaum — as well as two consultants, Hashim Coates and MiDian Shofner. Of these board members, only Anderson is no longer a board member. All the others continue in office, and apparently continue to refuse to recognize that they are not dictators, but servants of the parents and children in their schools.

The most shameful aspect of this story is how quickly so many people accepted these false charges on their face, without any skepticism. As noted in Fry’s complaint:

Defendants’ lies about Ms. Fry stoked potentially dangerous reactions from the broadcast viewership. Among other things, in the publicly-available comment section, viewers wrote, “who is Kristen Fry?” and “sounds like a racial hate crime occurred,” and “[b]ring your folding chair,” the latter in reference to a violent episode earlier that month in which a folding chair was used as a weapon in a race-related brawl in Alabama.

During this time period, the defamatory accusations against Ms. Fry were becoming known to wide swaths of the Denver community. Ms. Fry even received an unprompted message from a friend warning her that she “just got a text from a friend saying ur going around calling people the N word . . . Giving u a heads up that ur reputation is going in that direction.”

Americans have got to stop acting like sheep!

You would think that by now the public would recognize that accusations such as these are almost always proven false, that in almost every instance the accuser lies, using the accusation merely to stave off criticism or any opposition. That has now been the track record of these kinds of slanders now for more than two decades.

Fry must win her case, and she must do so by making these individuals pay. At the same time, Americans of all stripes have got to stop providing any aid or comfort to goons like this, who use racial tension to destroy others for their own gain.