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Librarian Terri Lesley said she endured years of “pure hell” fighting to keep embattled books on the public library shelves of Gillette, a deeply conservative coal town in northeastern Wyoming.

After getting fired, Lesley fought two more years alleging public officials wrongfully terminated her for refusing to bow to their demands for censorship — all while being threatened, failing to find another librarian job and suffering so much stress she lost sleep and hair.

Now, the 62-year-old’s legal fight is over. On Wednesday, Lesley, who worked for Campbell County Public Library System for 27 years, including 11 as executive director, agreed to settle her federal lawsuit against Campbell County, the county’s library board and several officials for $700,000. In a 78-page complaint filed in April in the U.S. District Court for Wyoming, she accused them of helping to wage a years-long campaign to bully her into removing books about race and LGBTQ+ people from the library. After she refused, she said they fired her, which led to her lawsuit.

“I wanted to take a stand on it and try to put up a barrier from it happening to other librarians,” Lesley said Thursday in an interview. “I thought, ‘If I don’t do this thing, it’s just going to keep happening.’”

Campbell County, the county’s public library board, county commissioners and the lawyers who defended them against Lesley’s suit did not respond to requests for comment from The Washington Post. In court filings, they denied Lesley’s allegations and said she was fired because of “concerns with her performance,” not in retaliation for engaging in constitutionally protected activity. They described her lawsuit as “an improper run-on narrative combining fact, fable, self-praise, and a self-heroic, tale.”

The controversy in Campbell County happened amid a larger movement to target content available in public libraries around the country, particularly those aimed at children and having to do with race, gender or sexual identity. For years, the number of “book challenges” — efforts to remove or restrict access to books — remained flat. But in 2021, challenges spiked 1,300 percent to more than 3,900, according to American Library Association data. They increased each of the next two years to more than 9,000 in 2023 before falling to about 5,800 last year.

School libraries experienced the same thing during that stretch, leading the free-speech nonprofit PEN America to declare book censorship in the United States “rampant and common” and “unprecedented in modern times.”

“Not since the 1950s McCarthy era of the Red Scare has censorship become so entrenched in schools,” the group said Wednesday in a news release, referring to the period when anti-Communist paranoia intensified to a fever pitch.

Campbell County was part of the first wave of the “book-banning craze engulfing the country” in 2021 when several residents demanded county commissioners and library board trustees censor young adult and children’s books with LGBTQ+ content, according to Lesley’s lawsuit.

Those critics denounced books such as “This Book Is Gay” and “Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness” as pornographic, obscene or racist. When Lesley resisted pressure to transfer such books out of the young adult and children’s sections or remove them from the library altogether, they targeted her for roughly two years, threatening her and accusing of criminal activity and endangering children, according to her lawsuit.

Instead of defending Lesley from that “campaign of fear and hate,” two county commissioners and four library board trustees allegedly joined it. In doing so, commissioners and trustees alienated LGBTQ+ people and propagated the hateful ideology that they are “dangers, abnormal, unwelcome, and their voices should be suppressed,” the suit states.

Over the next two years, Lesley kept resisting attempts to remove or restrict various books with LGBTQ+ themes, saying at library board meetings that doing so constituted censorship and violated the First Amendment, the suit states. Several lawyers agreed with that legal interpretation, which they shared with board trustees and county commissioners, according to the suit.

At one library board meeting, one of Lesley’s critics held up a sign that read “[Campbell County Public Library] Knowingly Encourages SEX for Minors and that’s a crime,” the suit alleges.

Amid the controversy, the American Library Association in March 2022 announced Lesley had won the John Phillip Immroth Memorial Award that recognizes “notable contributions to intellectual freedom and demonstrations of personal courage in defense of freedom of expression.”

Over the next five months, four of five library board members were replaced by county commissioners with ones more inclined to remove or restrict LGBTQ+ books, the suit states.

In July 2023, the library board voted to terminate Lesley.

“Their actions not only devastated Ms. Lesley professionally and personally, but also undermined the very mission of [the library system] and inflicted harm on the broader community,” the suit states. “For this, they must be held responsible.”

Lesley said she continues to be harmed by officials’ actions. More than two years after being fired, she hasn’t gotten a job in her field. A resident of Gillette since the second grade, she’s unwilling to move. She sought remote work in the field that wouldn’t require face-to-face interactions with patrons, but none of her efforts panned out.

Still, Lesley said she doesn’t regret standing up for what she believes was right, even if she’s paid a heavy price. She said she hopes the $700,000 settlement — more than five times what the county paid her annually — deters officials elsewhere from meddling with which books go on library shelves and where.

“They’ll see what happened here and maybe reconsider going down that road,” she said, with a pause, “is what I’m hoping for.”