A men’s rights activist sued a women’s beer event

Article here. Excerpt:

'But in November 2017, as Su tells Eater, a man emailed Eagle Rock’s general information line asking for a spot at the ticketed forum. A staff member mistakenly told the man that the event was for women only (in fact, men have attended before), and even after he was offered access to a future women’s beer event, the man ultimately filed a discrimination claim through the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, the entity in charge of enforcing California’s civil rights laws.

The man is Steve Frye, a men’s rights activist, or MRA, who is hardly a stranger to filing discrimination cases against California businesses and, at one point, Donald Trump. In 2011, Frye sued one of Trump’s golf courses because it offered a 25 percent discount to “ladies” for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

It’s just one of dozens of other lawsuits he’s filed for ladies’ night specials or deals for women. Men’s rights activists believe that society is actually sexist against men, and Frye has perfected the subculture’s favorite way to target what they see as a society that is sexist against men: suing businesses and organizations that incentivize women to go there.

And in many of these types of cases, the defendants end up settling due to the high cost of legal fees. Su made the difficult decision to settle in order to protect her brewery from bankruptcy, despite the fact that she believed in the Women’s Beer Forum and wanted to defend it in court.

She currently has a GoFundMe page that has raised more than $16,000 of the original $10,000 ask, but the money isn’t all for legal fees and the settlement: She’s aiming to raise awareness for small businesses and women’s groups to protect themselves against lawsuits from men’s rights activists. And, as she told Eater, she wants to “elicit some form of change at the legislative level to minimize the exploitation of the Unruh Act [a California law against discrimination by sex, race, and other factors] by career plaintiffs so that the small businesses and women’s groups don’t continually get targeted for these cases.”'