Plainfield, Ind. — from www.fox59.com – A business owner was told to remove some provocative blankets from her display store window, and now she’s filing a federal lawsuit against the city of Plainfield.
The display window for Trisha’s Treasures might not catch your eye these days, which is something the owner, Trisha Elhossainy, is hoping to change.
“This is the ‘mudflap girl’ blanket,'” Trisha said. “This is the last one that I had in the window.”
In roughly a year of business, Trisha says she found a way to attract a few more customers by placing provocative blankets in her window, but this summer the blankets also attracted the attention of city leaders across the street at the Plainfield municipal building.
“They just said that we were a Quaker community,” Trisha said. “And that we are conservative in this town and that I kind of needed to keep it clean.”
Trisha says she took down blanket that sparked the first complaint because she thought she had to. When she chose another blanket to take it’s place, she says she even tried to scale things back a bit. She chose a blanket showing three women in thong bikinis.
“But I had pillows stacked up so that it blocked the bottom part of them,” Trisha said.
But neither bikinis nor another showing a marijuana leaf were okay with the city. By the time, Trisha chose “mudflap girl” she says the town planner had apparently had enough.
“They told me that if I didn’t take it out of the window that he could reclassify me as an adult entertainment industry and could shut my shop down,” Trisha said.
Though Trisha again changed her window, she also called an attorney. Now the ACLU is helping her fight back by filing an injunction to stop the town from interfering with her First Amendment rights.
“The town has told me that they’ve had complaints,” Trisha said. “But nobody has come to complain to me.”
In fact, she says she received a lot of support from people around the community through phone calls and emails. Chris Blair says he’d never shopped at the store before, but reached out to Trisha because of what the city had done.
“If somebody is offended by it then it’s their right as an American,” Blair said. “But it’s also the right of an American to be able to make these statements.”
Meanwhile Trisha says the current blankets in her window aren’t making much of a financial kind of statement for her business.
“With animals and flowers and that’s it,” Trisha said. “That’s not going to attract the people to come in and buy things.”
It was too late in the day to contact the Plainfield town attorney for this story, but he told the Hendricks County Flyer that he believes the lawsuit was unnecessary because he thinks the two parties could have worked out their differences. However, Trisha says she has yet to hear anything from the town.