Kristen Fry was criminally charged after allegedly calling an activist the n-word at a school-board meeting. Fortunately, the incident was recorded.
It was near the end of the Denver school board meeting when Hashim Coates claims to have “experienced a jarring intrusion.” He was caught off guard, he said, by a “sudden unwelcome grip” on his shoulder.
He turned and recognized the face of a white parent he knew from past meetings.
“You dumb n*****,” the woman called him in a “venomous” whisper, he said.
For “someone who has endured the scars of both racial and sexual violence” that “vile racial slur” “cut to the core of past traumas,” Coates wrote the next day in an email to board members and the superintendent. He called on them to act “swiftly and decisively.”
The alleged assault against Coates occurred last August, amid impassioned debates over increasing school violence in Denver, and outcry from parents over changes to the district’s discipline polices, which the board watered down in the name of racial justice. Many parents at the time were also incensed over the firing of a popular principal who spoke out publicly about his concerns about security and faced charges of racism for trying to keep a student charged with attempted murder out of his middle school.
After receiving Coates’s email, the board members raced to apologize at the next board meeting. “It is never okay, never, for a white person to walk up to a black person and use that racial slur,” said Xochitl Gaytan, the board’s then-president.
But Coates was looking for more than an apology. He wanted action.
He filed a report with Denver police, repeating his charge that the white parent, Kristen Fry, had touched him and called him a racial slur. He repeated the story again on a podcast popular with Denver’s black community: he’d felt a “pain,” he said, an “unwelcome, unwarranted touch to my body” from Fry, who then used the racial epithet.
The police criminally cited Fry, and the city attorney upped the charges after Coates’s protestations. Coates receive a restraining order, which hampered Fry’s ability to engage in school-board politics. Fry was barred from volunteering at her kids’ school. She was publicly humiliated. She was forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers. She went on anti-anxiety medication and received a prescription for pills so she could sleep.
And, it turns out, Coates’s accusations against Fry were not true and appear to be entirely made up.
Surveillance video, eventually released after slow walking by the school district, shows that Fry never touched Coates, much less caused him any physical pain. And while the video has no sound, two of the people nearest to Coates during the incident — one a speaker, the other one of Coates’s own associates — say they never heard Fry use the racial slur; Fry, who herself participated in a racial-justice march after the death of George Floyd, claims Coates was being disruptive during the meeting and she simply urged him to be respectful.
While he is a regular at Denver school-board meetings, Coates is no concerned parent; he doesn’t appear to be a parent at all. Rather, he is a far-left political activist with a checkered past and a history of weaponizing allegations of racism. He also managed the campaigns of some of the school board’s most radical members.
He was deeply invested in the board’s push to make it harder to discipline or expel dangerous and disruptive students, part of an effort to “disrupt bias” and “fight disproportionality.” He was also a leader in the sacking of Kurt Dennis, the former McAuliffe International School principal who questioned the permissive discipline policies Coates and his allies on the school board championed.
Coates’s actions against Fry and Dennis, coming in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in 2020, show just how far some radical racial-justice activists were willing to go — and who they were willing to take out — to impose what former Denver school-board member and Coates ally, Auon’tai Anderson, described as “policies that are pro–Black Lives Matter.”
In mid-August, Fry sued Denver Public Schools, four current or former board members, as well as Coates and one of his associates, accusing them of defaming her, violating her free-speech rights, and abusing the criminal-justice process to retaliate against her.
The lawsuit alleges that the defendants conspired against Fry to make an example out of her, and to send the message “to other members of the community that they could be next if they did not get on board with the defendants’ policies.”
In an email to National Review, Denver schools spokesman Scott Pribble denied that district leaders conspired to target Fry or to make an example of her, but said he could not comment further due to pending litigation.
Reached on his cell phone, Coates declined to answer questions. “Why do you care about this?” he asked. He expressed confusion, repeatedly spoke over a National Review reporter, accused the reporter of being “dishonest and untruthful,” and said he would consider any further calls “harassment beyond this point.” Then he hung up.
James Kerwin, a lawyer for the Mountain State Legal Foundation, which is representing Fry, called the case “disturbing” and “grim,” and said it has implications beyond Denver.
“We’ve become accustomed to cancel culture and really bare-knuckle political tactics,” he said. “The possibility of facing jail time and a criminal conviction just for opposing some kind of very activist policies is really chilling.”
‘We Knelt in Honor of George Floyd’
While Coates and his allies have attempted to paint her as kind of “white supremacist,” Kristen Fry seems rather unlikely to have a collection of white hoods in her closet.
She is a married mother of a high-school-aged daughter and two teenage step-children and has a long history of volunteerism — Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, Junior Achievement, a local food bank and homeless shelter, a nonprofit that helps seniors learn to use technology.
After Floyd’s killing in 2020, she made Facebook posts expressing concerns about systemic racism, promoting an NAACP get-out-the-vote campaign, and discussing her participation in a BLM march and the importance of being “united against racial inequality.”
“This whole thing is quite ironic to me,” she said, “because my husband and I, and one of our daughters, actually marched behind Mr. Anderson [Coates’s ally] in a BLM protest. We knelt in honor of George Floyd, and cried for that.”
But Fry’s belief in racial equality didn’t translate into an anything-goes attitude about school safety. A series of shootings at or near a local high school — including the killing of a 16-year-old boy and the shooting of two school administrators — brought the threat of school violence close to home, she said.
Fry’s stepdaughter was at McAuliffe International at the time, and when Dennis, the school’s principal, explained his concerns around security, it was a wake-up call, she said. She started volunteering at McAuliffe, checking IDs of adults entering the building, and occasionally joining Dennis on perimeter checks of the school grounds. She also joined some parent groups focused on school safety that were popping up.
Fry said she was not surprised that the district punished Dennis — she’d seen the district retaliate against people before — but was shocked that they fired him. In his termination letter, Dennis is accused of divulging confidential information in a TV interview about the “young student of color” at McAuliffe who was facing an attempted-murder charge and other gun charges. Dennis, who has also sued the district, denies releasing any identifying information about the student.
“I thought there would be some sort of slap on the wrist or calling him out publicly,” Fry said of Dennis. “I was utterly shocked they would take somebody out of that position that was doing such good, I thought, for the community.”
Like many other concerned parents, Fry began attending school-board meetings and town halls, in part to defend Dennis. According to her lawsuit, the first town hall was in mid-July 2023. Coates was there, as were at least three of his allies — board members Anderson, Scott Esserman, and Michelle Quattlebaum. Another Coates ally, local activist and political consultant, MiDian Shofner, served as the moderator.
Fry said she was dismayed by their treatment of parents who opposed their safety policies. She didn’t know who Coates was at the time, but his behavior stood out.
“Mr. Coates was calling McAuliffe parents racist, with a broad brush,” she said, adding that he took aim at parents like her who volunteered at the school to check adult IDs, falsely accusing them of targeting black and brown students. “We were not interacting with children at all.”
Unwavering Honesty?
Coates does not appear to have any children in Denver schools. His passionate interest in local schools seems to be entirely political.
The Democratic activist runs a political consulting firm and has been involved in shaping the Denver school board into a vehicle for his racial-grievance politics. He ran the campaigns of Anderson and Esserman, two of the board’s most radical members.
According to his LinkedIn page and other accounts, Coates is also the director of a coalition of “Black and brown owners of cannabis businesses in Colorado.”
His social media is filled with his reflections on national politics, race, racism, and how “complex and hard” it is to be black. He recently chided people on X for not doing more to fight racism while “Black lives are still being slaughtered everyday globally & in America.” He has called “typical” white men “selfish,” and said they “don’t care.”
He also hasn’t been shy about using charges of racism as a weapon against his opponents. A few years back, when Anderson was found by investigators to have made unwelcome sexual advances toward young high-school girls — investigators deemed a separate sexual assault allegation unsubstantiated — Coates defended his friend and protégé, and called Anderson’s teenage critics “lil lying-ass racist girls” and “trash.”
Coates’s behavior appears to have hampered his own political ambitions. Earlier this year, he made a failed bid for a seat on Arapahoe County commission, pledging to “uphold unwavering honesty, even when faced with uncomfortable situations.”
But Coates seems to have not displayed “unwavering honesty” several years earlier when he fired a gun at the vehicle of the male prostitute he’d met on Backpage.com, and then refused to fully cooperate with police investigators.
After the December 2016 shooting, Coates confessed to police that he’d contacted the man for a sexual encounter — he acknowledged that he’d been meeting men online for hook-ups for over a decade, according to police reports. When he refused to pay the prostitute, the man stole his iPad, and demanded money for its return.
During the exchange in a mall parking lot, Coates pulled a Smith and Weston pistol out of his pocket and fired at the man’s car, which had three other people in it.
A police report from the time identified Coates as a serial “no-pay” john “who does not like to pay after the sex act, and resorts to calling the police to intimidate the prostitute to leave before they end up in trouble with the law.”
As part of a plea agreement, Coates pleaded guilty to prohibited use of a weapon, a class-two misdemeanor, according to an Aurora Sentinel report.
‘Doing that White Girl Thing’
Fry didn’t know Coates or his history when she approached him after town hall in August 2023. She said he had been passing out paperwork against Dennis at the door of the meeting, which she found off-putting. She attempted to have a dialogue with him.
Coates responded by loudly accusing Fry of racism “and ‘doing that white girl thing’ by disagreeing with him,” according to the lawsuit. Fry said she left the meeting in tears.
But things were about to get worse for her.
On August 21, 2023, the full school board held its final public comment session before it was to vote on upholding Dennis’s firing. Fry lined up to speak toward the end of the two-hour meeting. Coates and Shofner sat just to the right of the speaker’s podium.
Fry said it likely wasn’t “happenstance that he chose the seat right next to the podium.”
Throughout the meeting, Coates and Shofner were distracting and intimidating speakers, including children, Fry said. They coughed and laughed at people, and called speakers they disagreed with “white supremacist” and “racist,” the lawsuit says.
Standing in line to speak, Fry took a step toward Coates.
“I said, ‘Please be respectful of the speakers,’” she said. “And then he turned around, looked at me in shock, and said, ‘Did you just call me an N?’ Of course, he used the word.”
“I was in complete shock,” Fry said. “I leaned forward to him again, thinking, how can he misunderstand what I said. And I said, ‘No, please be respectful of the speakers.’”
Fry composed herself and spoke. Coates is not visible in the district’s recording of the meeting, but it shows Fry turned in Coates’s direction at least twice, telling him to “please be respectful of the speakers, sir,” and “excuse me.”
The next day, Coates emailed the board with his allegations against Fry. He doxed Fry on Facebook, identifying her account and calling her “the white woman” who “touched me without my permission.”
Coates and Anderson then appeared with Shofner on the Brother Jeff podcast, where they repeated the allegations. Coates said he was “recovering” from the encounter. He said he was “minding my own black-ass business” when “all of a sudden I feel this pain on my right shoulder” and Fry whispered “dumb n*****.”
He repeatedly stated that Fry touched him, and Shofner backed him up. “I was there,” she said. “He was touched. It was an unwarranted touch.”
Three days after the meeting, Coates filed a police report, writing that during the meeting he felt “pressure on my left shoulder” and then saw Fry, who called him a racial slur.
Shofner told police that she did not hear Fry call Coates the slur, but affirmed that she’d seen “Ms. Fry grab Mr. Coates on the shoulder,” according to a report.
Fry said she heard from a black friend about Coates’s and Shofner’s podcast comments. Fry said her friend didn’t believe the allegations, but wanted her to know that her “reputation was being damaged.” She said she called her friend to explain, but realized there were so many more listeners who “won’t ever ask me and just assume it was true.”
Her predicament “became real,” she said, when she was soon contacted by Denver police.
“We were told they were drafting a warrant for my arrest,” she said. “My husband had to ask if they were going to show up at our door and take me away in handcuffs in front of our children.”
Fry was cited with disturbing the peace. Unhappy with that, Coates met with the city attorney ahead of her arraignment and accused Fry of “escalating” the “violent history” between them, the lawsuit says.
At her court appearance days later, Fry was served with a new misdemeanor charge of harassment strike/shove, and a sentencing enhancement of “ethnic intimidation.”
Coates also received a restraining order against Fry, the suit says. He listed his address as the school board building.
“I was terrified to go anywhere for months,” Fry said. “If he was willing to do this and make this up and make a false police report, what would stop him from going to my grocery store, unbeknownst to me, and then calling the cops and saying that I was violating the protection order. And then that would land me in jail.”
Exonerating Video
Over the following months, Coates and Anderson kept up their attacks. They compared the parent groups opposed to their preferred school security polices to the Ku Klux Klan.
“This is the same group that has a member Kristen Fry that assaulted Hashim Coates at our August Board meeting and called him a dumber [n*****] and now has a restraining order,” Anderson wrote on Facebook. “This is who these people are.”
Fry said she spent months alternating between “being a zombie and being hysterical.”
“I remember sitting at our kitchen counter at one point and looking at my husband and saying, ‘I’m not okay,’” she recalled. She ended up going to a therapist, and getting prescriptions for anti-anxiety medication and sleeping pills.
Fry said she and her husband spent “tens of thousands of dollars” on lawyers and legal fees. They tried to get security footage from the meeting to exonerate her. The school district claimed that the video was exempt from public records disclosure laws.
The lawsuit suggests that the school board “defendants withheld the video footage as part of their campaign of retaliation.”
The district turned over the video in December in response to a subpoena from Fry’s criminal defense attorney, the lawsuit states. Pribble, the district spokesman, said the video is a “criminal justice record,” and said they released it following the proper procedure.
The video shows that Fry approached Coates at the meeting with a piece of paper in her right hand. And it shows that she did not touch him.
As a result of the video, the criminal case against Fry was dismissed in January.
But did she use the racial slur? The security video has no sound, and the regular meeting, which is tuned to the speaker’s microphone, didn’t catch audio from the exchange.
Shofner, Coates’s ally, told police she didn’t hear it. Matt Rustici, the parent who was speaking while the exchange occurred, confirmed Fry’s account that Coates and Shofner were loud and disruptive. He said he didn’t hear the exchange between Coates and Fry, but he was sitting near her in the meeting and she told him about it.
“She sat back down and happened to sit next to me,” said Rustici, who didn’t know Fry at the time. “She said something like, ‘Oh my God, I’m sorry that those people were so loud.” And I said something like, ‘Oh my God, yeah, it was really rude.’ And she goes, ‘You would not not believe what Hashim Coates said.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ ‘He said I called him the n-word. It was insane.’”
National Review reached out the members of the board who were on the dais during the meeting, looking out in the crowd. They all apologized to Coates at their next meeting, but none of the three current and former board members who spoke to National Review — Quattlebaum, Carrie Olson, or Scott Baldermann — recalled the exchange.
“I can’t remember,” said Quattlebaum, adding that she’s “not at liberty to discuss anything.”
“I don’t recall. I’d have to go back and look at my notes,” Olson said. “I don’t have any comment right now. I’m driving.”
Baldermann, a former board member who was a regular opponent of Coates and his allies, said “they called me racist and said I was part of the Klan, too.”
Esserman and Gaytan didn’t respond to emailed questions from National Review. Attempts to reach Anderson, who is no longer on the board, were unsuccessful.
National Review spoke to two other parents who were at the meeting and agreed that Coates and Shofner were being disruptive and taunting speakers. They both sent emails to board members expressing their concerns.
When reached on her cell phone and asked about why she falsely claimed to have seen Fry “grab” Coates during the meeting, Shofner said she would be open to an “authentic conversation later on.” She then texted back and said National Review was focused on “divisive narratives,” and to “cease and desist” contacting her.
Kerwin, the Mountain State Legal lawyer, said the question of whether Fry actually used a racial slur during her exchange with Coates will likely come down to a “battle of credibility.”
“We’re going to win that battle pretty easily,” he said.
Fry said she and her husband were conflicted about filing the lawsuit. They’ve already been threatened online, and they say it’s likely that Coates and his allies will level new accusations of racism “on a grander scale to defend themselves.”
But she said it’s important that parents feel safe speaking out against Denver officials.
“We believe there is a reason that this happened to me,” she said. “I am strong enough to stand up to bullies and not let them get away with this.”