A San Diego woman who sued the man behind a viral GoFundMe campaign that raised more than $100,000 for a Starbucks barista saw her entire case thrown out of court months after she filed it. Amber Gilles accused Matt Cowan and his marketing agency of defamation and misusing her image after he launched the fundraiser in response to a Facebook post she wrote about a maskless confrontation at a San Diego Starbucks in June 2020.
The dispute began when Gilles visited the Starbucks without a mask and barista Lenin Gutierrez asked her to wear one. In a Facebook video posted after the incident, Gutierrez said that when Gilles entered the store without a mask, he asked if she had one and was preparing to show her Starbucks’ corporate health guidelines before she photographed him and left, according to a report from the San Diego Union-Tribune. Gilles posted his photo to Facebook with the caption “meet lenen from starbucks who refused to serve me cause i’m not wearing a mask,” a post that went on to receive hundreds of thousands of interactions, as originally reported by Tampa Bay 28.
The confrontation happened just after Governor Gavin Newsom issued a statewide face-covering mandate on June 18, 2020, and San Diego County had already required masks inside businesses since May 1, 2020, according to Business Insider. Gilles claimed she had a medical exemption preventing her from wearing a mask and provided two documents to support that claim, including one from an unnamed San Diego chiropractor stating she had underlying breathing conditions. She also said she had mask-acne issues, said she was sick, and said she did not believe masks prevented the spread of COVID-19.
A Small Fundraiser Turns Into a $105,000 Windfall
Cowan, who co-founded the Irvine-based digital marketing agency Mercy Agency LLC, set up the GoFundMe campaign in June 2020 with a modest goal of just $1,000 after seeing Gilles’s Facebook post, according to Law & Crime. He said he did not personally know Gutierrez and used only publicly available information to create the fundraiser, adding that he did not use company resources or organizational connections to support the campaign. The campaign ultimately collected $105,445 from more than 7,000 individual donors, and Cowan, along with YouTuber Will Collette, presented the money to Gutierrez on July 7, 2020, to support his education and his passion for dance, the outlet reported…