Updated at 9:15 a.m. Dec. 12
Six employees are no longer working at an Oakland cafe after a video circulated online showing three of them denying a Jewish customer re-entry to the bathroom after she complained about anti-Zionist and anti-Israel graffiti.
Three workers at Farley’s East were fired and another three resigned in protest, according to a statement shared widely by the staff members and posted on Sunday.
A day earlier, the owners had announced that the three staffers in the video were no longer employed at the cafe, calling their behavior “shocking and unacceptable.”
https://twitter.com/FarleysEast/status/1733503803385860100
“Events like these strike fear in the Jewish community and perpetuate the rise of antisemitism in our community and around the world,” according to the statement signed by owners Chris and Amy Hillyard. “We do not tolerate any behavior at Farley’s that makes people feel unwelcome or unsafe.”
The cafe closed on Friday and has yet to reopen, one employee confirmed.
And now, some employees are telling another side of the story.
A statement by the staffers, who are calling their group “Former Farley’s East United,” said their response was motivated by the “unwillingness and refusal” of the cafe’s owners to “protect staff after a right-wing doxxing campaign targeted our fellow coworkers with violence and hatred.”
The doxxing “occurred after a video depicting three of our coworkers blocking a customer from re-entering one of our restrooms has gone viral,” the statement continued. “The narrative is that they denied her entry because she is a Jewish woman. That is a lie.”
The original incident occurred on Dec. 3 when a customer noticed graffiti in the restroom that said “Zionism=Facism,” among other messages.
In the video, taken by the customer, three employees stand in front of the bathroom door while she repeatedly asks to re-enter. One employee states, “This is private property and you need to leave.” The woman insists, telling them that she is a patron. One of the employees, who has been identified as Jesse Turner, appears to taunt her, saying, “I know Israel loves taking private property and saying it’s their own, but we gotta have–.”
Eventually they let the woman into the bathroom, where she captures images of the graffiti.
The statement by Former Farley’s East United, which includes current and former employees, said the cafe’s owners knew about the graffiti and failed to take action until the confrontation with the customer went viral. The statement alleges that Chris Hillyard had been aware of the graffiti for two months.
The narrative is that they denied her entry because she is a Jewish woman. That is a lie.
The Hillyards did not respond to a request for comment sent on Monday.
The customer reportedly had spoken with the on-site manager the day of the incident and was told the cafe knew about the graffiti and had no plans to remove it. When she tried to return to the restroom to make a video of the messages, the workers briefly stood in her way while making anti-Israel comments. The video now has over 9 million views.
The employees’ statement claims a similar confrontation took place with another customer the next day, and that a manager asked Chris Hillyard to remove the graffiti to prevent further harassment of staff.
According to the statement, the owners took action only after the customer’s video went viral. The video prompted a flood of one-star Yelp reviews of the cafe, calls for boycott and coordinated efforts on social media to identify and harass the involved employees.
As J. reported last week, a group called the Shirion Collective, which describes itself as a “Jewish surveillance collective” that uses artificial intelligence to scrape the internet for “digital fingerprints” to “aggressively track and expose antisemites,” doxxed two of the employees by posting identifying information on X, including their names, addresses, phone numbers and names of possible relatives.
On Thursday, a day after the video went viral, the Hillyards released a statement on social media acknowledging the incident as an “error” and offering a “sincere apology.” On Friday, they met with Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area CEO Tye Gregory, who posted about the meeting on X, along with a new statement from Farley’s. That statement was released Saturday on Farley’s social media platforms.
https://twitter.com/TyeGregory/status/1733554655194407233
The counter statement by Former Farley’s East United is on Instagram, where customers and community organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace Bay Area, have shown support for the workers, with some calling for a boycott of Farley’s.
“We want to be very clear, this is all a distraction from the genocide occurring in Gaza,” the workers’ statement concluded. “We, the aforementioned baristas, the community, and the city of Oakland, are calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire. We will not shy away from this moment as the Hillyards have chosen to do. They have made it clear where they stand and so have we.”
Hoss Brown, a current employee at the cafe and a spokesperson for Former Farley’s East United, told J. on Monday that management had not shared its plans to reopen the cafe since closing it on Friday.
Brown said that Turner, one of the fired employees, wants people to know that he is aware that “in his frustration” he “failed as an employee to defuse an already emotionally tense situation.”
Brown added that Farley’s East, which opened in 2009, has “always been a place for people of all walks of life, to feel welcome to come and have coffee and food and to socialize and to build community, and that the Jewish people are not exempt from that” and “will always be welcomed in Farley’s East or Farley’s SF.” Farley’s SF has been a Potrero Hill institution since 1989.
Both the owners and “every member of our staff also holds those values, and will stand by them.”