It was the feel good story of the weekend. A loving lesbian couple wins an $80,000 settlement with the city of Honolulu after claiming they were unfairly targeted and arrested by a police officer for showing affection in a grocery store last year. In return, the pair, Courtney Wilson and Taylor Guerrero, say they will drop discrimination claims.
But the real story of the settlement doesn’t seem to be the officer’s behavior, but rather the media’s credulous coverage. After the settlement was announced, news organizations led with headlines like this one from NBC News:
Other headlines:
Honolulu settles with lesbian couple arrested after kissing (CBS News)
Hawaii forced to pay gay couple $110,000 after arrest for kissing in public and three days in jail (SBS News, Australia)
US Hawaii: Lesbian pair held after kissing win damages (The Star, Kenya)
The Associated Press, for example (wh0se article ran worldwide), painted a bleak picture of Hawaiian hospitality, citing only the pair’s lawsuit against the city, which alleged that “that [Police Officer] Harrison saw them holding hands and kissing in a grocery store in March of 2015 and told them to stop and ‘take it somewhere else’,” and that Harrison, “threw Plaintiff Guerrero on to the ground, striking Plaintiff Wilson in the process, and placed both of them in restraints.”
Did the police get a chance to tell their side of the story? Only a brief mention in the AP article where one official assures the AP that after an internal investigation, “the allegations were not sustained,” and that the officer had retired.
As is often the case with national media playing fast and loose with the facts, you need to look to more careful, on-the-ground reporting from local media to get a sense of what really may have happened. In fact, local media covered the incident far differently and included eyewitness accounts that made Wilson and Guerrero — who were visiting from Los Angeles — look less like folk heroes than inappropriate, out of control tourists.
Hawaii News Now reported last year that the pair were not simply holding hands but, per a first-hand account, “there was French kissing. Their shorts were really short. They were grabbing bottoms and lifting shirts.” The witness says that the officer approached the pair because they were being inappropriate, an assessment the officer shared in his testimony: “I noticed the two defendants were in an embrace with one another. Inappropriately all over each other in a long, heated kiss in the back of the store,” he told the court. “After I told them to stop I walked toward them because they wouldn’t stop. In my opinion it was lewd conduct in what they were doing. I wouldn’t want my children to see that.”
The officer said that he was delivering a message on behalf of the store, which was considering reporting the pair for trespassing. That’s when things got physical. According to the officer and the eyewitness, Wilson threw a punch, striking the officer square in the face. Wilson testified that, “He was choking her out like this with his hand backwards. I came over and I tried to shove him off of her. He was a big man. He’s not moving. The officer did get hit. I broke his sunglasses. He did get hit in the face. That’s when I got hit in the face.”
The officer contended that he did not choke or hit anyone. Honolulu officials later said they were settling the case in the best interests of the city, but that they were not admitting any officer wrongdoing.
Regardless of either account’s veracity, national media seem unwilling to acknowledge that there were any real competing versions of the incident, instead taking the lesbian couple at their word that they were standing up to bigotry, even quoting one of the pair as saying, “For the publicity that it has gained, I hope that people saw it and it gives them inspiration to stand up for the civil rights that we have and to not tolerate bigotry behavior [sic] like that because it’s not acceptable.”
As for the kissing lesbians, they say they’ll split the bounty from their threatened litigation. They are no longer a couple though they are “still friends”. One of them has returned to Los Angeles. The other became so enamored by supposedly bigoted Hawaii that she decided to stay there permanently.
