(CN) - On a Saturday in February 2017, a group of high school friends made a video. One of them was running for class president of San Ramon Valley High in Danville, California, and they thought it would be fun to create a short campaign promo portraying him as James Bond rescuing a fellow student kidnapped by terrorists. Working without a script, each student improvised their own lines. They used fake guns and a car. Two days later, the video went up on YouTube. It was meant to be funny, the teens later said.
But not everyone agreed. In class the next day, the kid playing James Bond heard some students found it offensive. His friends who played terrorists were Afghan-Americans and practicing Muslims, and others found their portrayal of terrorists racially and culturally insensitive.
The video came down after roughly 12 hours and 30 views. What happened next stoked student walkouts, protests and an ongoing federal lawsuit claiming institutional bullying and suppression of free speech.
It also raised questions about how far schools can go to regulate students’ First Amendment rights, and whether that should include protecting other students from offensive speech.
On February 9, the kid playing Bond – identified only as N.Y. in court documents – was called into the vice-principal’s office, where assistant principals Jamie Keith and Dearborn Ramos questioned him.
In court documents, N.Y. says Ramos belittled him and accused him of being “smug” and “unremorseful,” and that Keith said a suspension would affect his chances of getting into college. They even made fun of his driving, N.Y. claimed. When assistant principal Bernie Phelan joined in, he focused on the use of guns in the video, allegedly threatening to have a school resource officer get a warrant to search his home.
In a statement N.Y. says he wrote after a three-hour interrogation, he claims he did not mean the video to be racist and certainly didn’t expect the reaction it got. “We wanted something entertaining and to keep the people who viewed it laugh,” he wrote. “My intent for the video was to portray me as a hero like James Bond saving the day. I personally didn’t expect the turnout."
The school kicked N.Y. out of leadership class, disqualified him from the election and stripped him of his current position as junior class president.
On May 15, 2017, N.Y.’s attorneys informed the San Ramon Valley School District that they intended to sue unless N.Y. was reinstated. The next day, he was. The district also decided N.Y. should be allowed to be president since he had received the most votes anyway.
It seems N.Y. got what he wanted. So how did he and his parents end up in federal court?
In a federal lawsuit filed in San Francisco in July 2017, N.Y. describes the backlash against his reinstatement as swift and severe. In May, Dr. Jason Reimann, a school district official, allegedly told students that N.Y. had only been restored to the presidency because of the threatened litigation.
“The presentation was specifically designed to align the student body against N.Y.,” the lawsuit says.
Students staged a walkout in May, and in June, 140 teachers, staff and school district employees presented the school board with a letter of protest over N.Y.’s reinstatement.