{"id":293641,"date":"2026-04-30T19:39:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T19:39:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/293641\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T19:39:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T19:39:07","slug":"oc-city-must-pay-1m-for-library-censorship-lawsuit-judge-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/293641\/","title":{"rendered":"OC City Must Pay $1M For Library Censorship Lawsuit, Judge Says"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>HUNTINGTON BEACH, CA \u2014 The City of Huntington Beach must pay around $1 million in legal bills for restricting minors&#8217; access to certain books at the city&#8217;s public library, an Orange County judge ordered this week. <\/p>\n<p>Orange County Judge Lindsey Martinez said in a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.occourts.org\/sites\/default\/files\/oc\/default\/tentative-rulings\/lmartinezrulings.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">tentative ruling released Monday, April 27<\/a>, that the city needs to pay $960,000 to attorneys from four legal organizations, who billed more than 1,300 hours of work on the lawsuit against the city&#8217;s book restriction policy.<\/p>\n<p>Former librarian and plaintiff in the case Erin Spivey told The Orange County Register that she&#8217;s pleased with the ruling, but frustrated by what she says is the city&#8217;s continued waste of taxpayer money. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;As a resident of Huntington Beach, it&#8217;s incredibly frustrating to know we&#8217;re losing another $1 million that could have been solved just by putting 10 books back where they belong,&#8221; Spivey told the newspaper. &#8220;It just shows that the City Council is not interested in listening to what residents have to say.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Martinez ruled in September the the city&#8217;s book restriction policy violated the state&#8217;s Freedom to Read Act and cannot be enforced. <\/p>\n<p>The city&#8217;s book restriction was intended to bar children from accessing books with sexual content at the Huntington Beach Central Library without parent consent. <\/p>\n<p>The restricted titles, which included \u201cIt\u2019s Perfectly Normal\u201d and \u201cSex is a Funny Word,\u201d were placed on a shelf on the fourth floor of the Central Library.<\/p>\n<p>The City Council voted unanimously in October to appeal the decision, and the case is currently pending in the appeals court.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HUNTINGTON BEACH, CA \u2014 The City of Huntington Beach must pay around $1 million in legal bills for&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":293642,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164],"class_list":["post-293641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/293642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}