Fired Wyoming librarian hopes $700,000 settlement deters conservative lawmakers. They say it won’t.

FROM WYOFILE: 

Former Gillette librarian announced the settlement of her lawsuit against Campbell County and conservatives on the library board days before a key legislative meeting.

The Gillette librarian who this week settled a lawsuit against Campbell County over her July 2023 firing for a $700,000 payment says she hopes Wyoming lawmakers take note of the hefty sum.

Terri Lesley sued in April, alleging the Campbell County Public Library System Board of Trustees violated her First Amendment right to free speech and dismissed her in retaliation for her opposition to efforts by local conservatives to control where LGBTQ-centered books appeared in the library.

“My hope is that this will be a deterrent,” Lesley told WyoFile on Thursday, “that we can shut down all these censorship efforts in Wyoming and beyond.” 

But two Wyoming Freedom Caucus lawmakers who want the Legislature to weigh in on library materials statewide were quick to dismiss the idea that the hefty settlement should serve as a warning. The settlement does not include an admission of guilt by the county or trustees, they said, and is a separate matter from their legislative efforts.

The lawsuit Lesley settled this week was one of two she’s brought since her firing, with the second coming against members of a family, the Bennetts, who had prominently advocated for her removal as library director.

That lawsuit remains ongoing. Both suits were filed in federal court.

The Gillette News Record broke the story Wednesday and it quickly became a national news story. That news came just days ahead of a pivotal legislative committee hearing in Wyoming’s ongoing political debate over who should control access to library books. Lawmakers on the Joint Judiciary Committee will vote Monday on whether to bring a bill to the 2026 legislative session that would impose steep fines on public libraries and schools that leave books containing sexual material in places accessible to minors. 

Lesley, her lawyers, and a group of Wyoming advocacy organizations, librarians and other bill opponents see the court settlement as vindication of their stance against such laws.

“This case is about accountability and the rule of law,” Azra Taslimi, one of Lesley’s attorneys, told WyoFile. “It’s about what happens when government officials cross a constitutional line and try to prevent and punish a public servant for doing her job. Ms. Lesley was fired for standing up for the First Amendment, and the $700,000 settlement speaks volumes. It says the censorship has consequences that are legal as well as financial.”

Taslimi, who said her firm has worked on cases on behalf of librarians in other states, described efforts to regulate the material available in Wyoming  libraries as part of a nationwide push by conservative politicians to censure LGBTQ literature.

“These bills are not about protecting children,” Taslimi said. “They’re about controlling what people can read, think and talk about. What these bills are really trying to do is criminalize inclusion and erase stories that make some politicians uncomfortable.”

Lawmakers undeterred

In text messages to WyoFile, two House lawmakers from the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, who have been prominent advocates for regulating young people’s access to some books, indicate the lawsuit is unlikely to dissuade their efforts.

Rep. Anne Lucas, a Cheyenne Republican, Freedom Caucus-endorsed lawmaker and architect of the legislation now in front of the Judiciary Committee, told WyoFile the lawsuit settlement did not give her any pause in pushing forward. 

“The Library isn’t admitting any wrongdoing,” she wrote of the settlement agreement, and “by accepting it, Ms. Lesley agrees.” 

Lucas described the lawsuit as “an employment case, not a first amendment case and has nothing to do with legislative considerations.”

House Appropriations Committee Chairman John Bear, whose wife Sage Bear is a library trustee and was a defendant in the lawsuit, accused Lesley of being out for money, not standing on principle. 

“It is clear that the terminated librarian was more concerned about fleecing her prior employer than the supposed altruistic motive of standing up for LGBTQ rights,” Bear wrote. 

“I don’t believe the county’s insurance company or their attorneys should have settled this case, but I understand the business decision to attempt to keep costs of frivolous litigation minimized,” Bear wrote. Instead, he called for reform to Wyoming’s tort laws, which govern civil lawsuits and allow people like Lesley to sue for damages. 

Until lawmakers pass such reforms, “the left will always take advantage,” he wrote. 

The library book bill currently under consideration would likely open the door for more lawsuits against the government, but from people on the political right. The legislation creates a pathway for citizens to sue schools and libraries they believe are violating the rules. 

For her part, Lesley described standing up to political pressure for two years before her firing, including that brought by Sage Bear, as personally difficult but driven by obligations to her work and community. The same was true of her decision to sue, she said. 

“It has been very hard,” she told WyoFile. “But I felt like I had to do it, that I had to stand up for the First Amendment. It’s what libraries are about.” 

Lesley had worked in the Campbell County library system for nearly thirty years before she was fired.

Conservatives behind book regulating measures have pushed past legal warnings before. In Campbell County, the library trustees fired Lesley despite an explicit warning against doing so from a deputy county attorney in March 2022. In hindsight, the attorney nearly predicted this week’s settlement years before it became reality. 

“Litigation regarding censorship — which is waiting in the wings on all sides — would be cripplingly costly, time consuming, and very likely unsuccessful for the County,” the attorney wrote, according to a copy of her email included in Lesley’s lawsuit.

On Thursday, Rep. Bear continued to uphold the efforts of Campbell County conservatives, which resulted in the contested books ultimately being moved into the adult section of the library after Lesley’s firing. 

“Gillette public libraries are the first in the nation to stop the left’s onslaught on the innocence of children by moving books that sexualize children to the adult section of the library,” Bear wrote to WyoFile. “Is $700,000 too much to pay to save our children?”

But Lesley, who still lives in Gillette, said she does not believe the Freedom Caucus speaks for most Wyomingites on the issue. 

“I think they are representing a minority,” she said, describing herself as a fourth-generation resident of the state. “It’s a live-and-let live kind of state, and I just don’t see the people I know signing on to this.”

The librarian has received an outpouring of support from around Wyoming since taking her stand against the efforts to remove library books that began in Gillette in 2021, she said. At the special meeting where Lesley was fired, hundreds of people showed up to support her, while a few dozen residents attended to back the board, according to Gillette News Record reporting at the time. 

Legislative debate

Lawmakers have also seen mounting public opposition as Monday’s bill has moved through the interim period. In Casper in August, they faced a packed meeting room, the majority of whom were there in opposition to the bill, though it also drew supporters. Testimony at that meeting included a Methodist pastor who read lawmakers sexually explicit passages from the Bible — arguing their legislation would censure that religious text from children’s eyes as well.

In Cheyenne on Monday, the Judiciary Committee will not take further public testimony, having sat through hours of it in Casper. The Legislative Service Office’s website already lists more than a dozen proposed amendments, and lawmakers are likely to bring more on the spot. Ahead of the meeting, advocacy groups have continued to call on their members to write lawmakers in opposition to the measure.

“Terri Lesley stood up for freedom, families, and the First Amendment, and she was proven right,” Nate Martin, a Laramie school board member and director of one such group, Better Wyoming, told WyoFile. “Now, as lawmakers consider a statewide ban along the lines of Campbell County’s, and they’re getting a thousand individuals contacting them in opposition to the bill, they’re finding out that the people of Wyoming don’t like book bans any more than the courts do.”

Local political activists, namely the Bennett family, did not just push for Lesley’s firing, they also sought to have her prosecuted. The Bennetts in 2021 pressed the Campbell County District Attorney’s Office to prosecute Lesley for providing obscene material to minors.

Prosecutors declined to bring charges after conducting what they described as an extensive review of state statutes, according to that still-active lawsuit, which Lesley filed in September 2023. The county attorney found that the books in question did not meet state statute’s definition of obscene materials, which requires sexual content to also lack “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”

The bill in front of the Joint Judiciary Committee would circumvent that language, which is derived from the legal test established by a pivotal 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case. In that case, Miller v. California, the justices found that literature or other content that carried those broader values could not be regulated as obscene without violating the First Amendment. 

Monday’s draft bill instead would insert into Wyoming law a list of definitions of sexual acts that cannot be depicted in literature available to a minor. 

The definitions include graphic descriptions like “ejaculation onto the person of another” or “contact between the mouth and genitalia or mouth and anus.” But critics say it does not take in the value or purpose of the work as a whole — like the more graphic passages of the Bible, which play into larger themes of the religious text. 

It would instead, Lesley said, allow conservative activists to go in and cherry pick sections of texts that offend them, without considering what value those books may bring young readers.

The current draft bill carries a suggestion from the Legislative Service Office — the state attorneys who draft bills and guide lawmakers on how to avoid conflicts with existing or constitutional law. 

“The Committee may wish to consider the use of the existing definition for ‘obscene’ as the designation of sexually explicit material,” LSO staff attorneys wrote in the bill draft. They are referring to the language derived by the Miller case, and cited by the county prosecutors who declined to criminally charge Lesley.

WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.

This story was posted on Oct. 10, 2025.