An Oregon beauty-salon owner is suing Governor Kate Brown and other officials for their coordinated attacks on her, including threatening to take away her children, after she reopened her business during a Brown-ordered lockdown.
In a scathing, no-holds-barred complaint, Lindsey Graham, owner of Glamour Salon in Salem, Oregon, alleges that officials “engaged in a course of conduct intended to harass, intimidate, extort and bully [her] into complying with an edict of … Brown.”
Brown, a Democrat, issued a stay-at-home order on March 23. That order demanded the closure of most cosmetology services, though it exempted those in senior housing and long-term care facilities. Graham initially complied. However, after attending a lockdown protest on May 2, she decided to reopen her business on May 5.
“As soon as I tried to open my doors against the governor’s mandate back in May, she came at me with the full weight of the state,” Graham told Fox News Channel’s The Ingraham Angle Monday.
“She terrorized myself, she terrorized my stylists, and she terrorized my family. She took every government agency she could, and she put her full weight into intimidating me into closing, including sending Child Protective Services to my home and threatening the removal of my children.”
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On May 4, the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) threatened Graham with a fine of up to $70,000 if she reopened. Graham says in her lawsuit that OSHA knew they could not impose such a fine because they have no jurisdiction over a business with no employees, and all the stylists in her shop are independent contractors.
On subsequent days, Graham, who leases her salon space from the city of Salem and is licensed by the state, received letters telling her she might lose her lease and her license.
On May 8, an agent of the state’s child welfare office appeared at Graham’s home and “interviewed my children without my presence,” she told Fox News. Her suit alleges that the agent was sent to her home on the basis of an anonymous complaint from someone who admitted to not having witnessed the conduct she was reporting — a complaint Graham believes was “a complete and total fabrication.” The agent later closed the case, having found the complaint to be baseless.
Graham claims that the state’s actions caused her “emotional distress and trauma manifesting itself in nausea, migraine headaches and other physical pain,” and she is seeking $100,000 in damages for this plus the economic and reputational injuries she has suffered.
However, she is also attacking the very notion that Brown has the authority to order lockdowns. “Graham did not, and does not, believe that Defendant Kate Brown has the lawful authority to force private businesses to cease operations if the private businesses can demonstrate they can operate safely without jeopardizing the public’s health” — something Graham certainly has done given that, according to her lawsuit, none of Glamour’s customers since May 5 has come down with COVID-19.
Furthermore, she argues that while Brown “claimed the orders were necessary to protect the public’s health, safety and welfare,” they actually “caused greater negative health effects on Oregonians in the form of increased stress, anxiety and depression.”
“While private business owners and their employees were forced to struggle through the government’s draconian edicts, the individual defendants named in this action remained comfortable, collecting a paycheck on the backs of the very people who were losing their jobs, careers and businesses,” reads the lawsuit.
Graham is asking the court to issue injunctions against Brown’s orders and related actions taken against her on the basis that they violate the U.S. and Oregon constitutions’ guarantees of freedom of speech, equal protection of the laws (because some cosmetologists were exempted), due process of law, and no taking of private property without just compensation.
“The government has used the fear of pandemic as an excuse to trample on the rights of Oregonians,” the complaint rightly declares. “If the government can avoid the ‘inconvenience’ of respecting the constitutional rights of individuals by simply declaring the existence of a ‘public health emergency,’ then the rights guaranteed by the United States and Oregon Constitutions are nothing more than wasted ink on an old piece of paper.”
