San Diego artist reaches $450K settlement over bubble show citation

SAN DIEGO (CN) — What began as a dispute over bubbles in a city park ended three years later with a nearly half-million dollar settlement in favor of a San Diego-based artist.

The artist William Dorsett, who said the city of San Diego violated his First Amendment right to free speech for citing him with a disorderly conduct violation, will no longer take the lawsuit to trial. U.S. District Judge Barry Moskowitz, a Bill Clinton appointee, granted a joint motion to dismiss Dorsett’s case against the city on Friday.

Dorsett, a multidisciplinary artist who creates art in different locations throughout San Diego, settled with the city for $450,000.

“I’m pretty happy with it,” Dorsett told Courthouse News in a phone interview. “I think if we stretched it out longer, we could have gotten more, but realistically this was stressful.”

On July 25, 2023, Dorsett defended another public artist in Balboa Park who was being cited by park rangers for a bubble show. Dorsett encouraged the man as he was cited by the rangers for a public health violation, he says in his complaint.

Dorsett said the city has maintained a practice of targeting buskers and public artists like himself to get them off the street.

“Don’t let them intimidate you,” Dorsett said to the artist during the incident, which was captured on video. “They’re being bullies.”

At the time, buskers and artists were being targeted with citations by city officials at places like Balboa Park and didn’t know what to do, Dorsett said.

“I went to perform and be an observer and every single day I was there I was getting video footage of how they were treating people, and they didn’t like me being there,” he said. “I was just trying to defend buskers who don’t know their rights.”

Dorsett was then cited by park rangers himself for disorderly conduct based on Section 56.27, which he described as an outdated city code.

“In this case, they were using a 130-year-old law to chill free speech,” he said.

Dorsett was convicted of disorderly conduct and ordered to pay a fine. However, his conviction was reversed in the California Courts of Appeal in May of 2024.

Dorsett filed a lawsuit in federal court in 2024, claiming the city violated his First and 14th Amendment rights.

The city repealed Section 56.27 in March 2025 due to a preliminary injunction preventing its enforcement as a result of Dorsett’s lawsuit, his attorney Michele McKenzie explained in an email. Then, the district court found the law was too vague, she said.

“The Constitution protects Dorsett’s right to criticize law officers, but Section 56.27 allowed officers to cite him if his conduct or speech was in their view ‘offensive’ or ‘vulgar or indecent,’” Moskowitz wrote in July 2025. “The ordinance thus chilled a substantial amount of free speech and was unconstitutionally overbroad.”

Through the discovery process, McKenzie said she and her colleagues found other instances where the ordinance was being used by law enforcement to punish speech it did not like.

The San Diego City Council approved the $450,000 in April.

“I feel vindicated,” Dorsett said.

Dorsett is among several others in the city who claim that the city is also targeting street vendors. In a separate incident in February 2023, Dorsett said he was painting and displaying his artwork at Ocean Beach when he was approached by six police officers who cited him under the city’s street vending laws.

Dorsett says this is also a violation of his constitutional rights.

“Deciding who is and who isn’t an artist is going to get you in trouble," he said. “All of those things have turned into lawsuits. I’m one of those lawsuits.”

The city of San Diego declined to comment.