Local News in Brief : Anaheim : GOP Figure Sues Party, City for False Arrest

A Los Angeles schoolteacher filed a civil rights lawsuit in Orange County Superior Court on Friday claiming that she was falsely arrested and detained during a state Republican convention in September, 1987.

Ezola Foster, 49, asked for $475,000 in damages against the state Republican Party, the city of Anaheim and the Anaheim Hilton Hotel and Towers, the site of her arrest.

Foster, president of the Los Angeles-based Black Americans for Family Values, was arrested on charges of criminal trespassing, disturbing the peace and resisting arrest. The arrest of Foster, a delegate at the state convention and a registered guest at the hotel, took place while she was passing out flyers that attacked GOP leaders.

Foster claimed that her arrest stemmed from opposition by Republican moderates to her resolutions supporting family values at the convention. She charged at the time that party leaders had abandoned family-oriented policies in favor of pornographers and homosexuals.

Republican officials, however, denied that they played any role in Foster’s arrest. Charges against her were later dropped.

“This was a deliberate case of censorship,” Foster’s attorney, David Liberman, said Friday. “This is what this case is really all about.”

Foster, who is still a member of the Central Committee of the state party, is a delegate to the Republican National Convention in New Orleans later this month.