5 hours ago
1
I never thought I’d end up in handcuffs and a jail cell for something I didn’t say.
But last May, police in New Haven, Conn., arrested me — because a parking attendant falsely claimed I had used a racial slur against him nearly a year earlier.
I denied it. I asked the cops to check the parking lot’s surveillance video.
They didn’t — and the state charged me first with disorderly conduct, then with three counts of breach of peace in the second degree.
It took almost a year, tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and endless stress before the nightmare ended on March 27, when the prosecutor finally dropped all charges.
Why? “Insufficient evidence,” “inconsistencies,” “credibility issues,” video that “clearly contradicted” the accuser’s claims — and a possibility that I wasn’t even the right person.
The judge dismissed the case.
If this can happen to me — a First Amendment advocate with resources, legal counsel and a public reputation to defend — it can happen to anyone.
In 2011, while still a student at Yale University, I founded the Buckley Institute, named for conservative hero William F. Buckley, Jr.
Our mission is to promote intellectual diversity and freedom of speech at Yale.
For the past decade, we’ve hosted an annual Disinvitation Dinner featuring speakers who have been disinvited from and disrupted on college campuses.
And now here I was, facing not merely an attempt at cancellation, but actual criminal charges that could mean prison if I was convicted.
It did not exactly feel like a coincidence.
The interest in my case seemed to have more to do with what the Buckley Institute represents than anything I ever did, or was accused of doing.
Headlines in local newspapers made much of both Buckley and conservatism generally, as left-leaning media outlets welcomed the opportunity to advance the dishonest narrative that everyone on the right is racist.
They made the malicious assumption that those who defend free speech do so to say offensive things.
The case was a farce from the start: There were no threats, no violence — just a made-up accusation, rubber-stamped by a system that didn’t bother to check basic facts before putting someone’s life through a meat grinder.
When the state finally obtained the video footage I had asked the police to view before arresting me — footage that had been accessible all along — it showed me, on multiple dates, calmly parking, getting out of my car and walking away.
No confrontation, not even any interaction, with the accuser.
No slurs.
No drama.
Keep up with today’s most important news
Stay up on the very latest with Evening Update.
Thanks for signing up!
Yet for nearly a year, I lived under a cloud of suspicion.
My experience should terrify anyone who values free speech and due process.
In America, we’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty — not guilty until you can scrape together enough money, time and evidence to clear your name.
I got no apology. Not from the accuser, his employer or the police.
Not from the prosecutor who entertained this blatantly unconstitutional charade, and not from the media outlets that treated an unproven allegation as fact.
The media didn’t seek out the truth. They just repeated one lie after another, eager to convict me in the court of public opinion.
One outlet uncritically published a local pastor’s comment that I was guilty “according to all the information that we have now” — even though the pastor’s church possessed the video footage that ultimately vindicated me.
One reporter asked my organization if I had been disciplined or asked to resign.
Another opined, after receiving a statement from a Buckley Institute board member, that I “ought to be willing to speak for [myself].”
I certainly wanted to speak for myself and refute the false allegations, but I was advised against it.
It was agonizing and isolating to watch my reputation tarnished over something I never said.
And as I’ve learned, once your name is dragged through the mud of a racism accusation, no stain remover can erase that disgusting and defamatory smear.
To this day, media outlets haven’t updated their original stories.
It took weeks for any of them to even cover the case’s dismissal.
This wasn’t about justice.
It was about ideology run amok.
When the woke campus mindset infects the criminal-justice system, fairness takes a back seat to political influence and pressure.
The parking attendant’s attorney suggested as much when he objected to the prosecutor’s decision to drop the case by bemoaning “the caste system in this country” in court.
The real systemic problem?
It’s not bias.
It’s cowardice.
It’s a criminal-justice system that rushes to judgment, punishes the innocent and works on a sluggish timeline to correct its own mistakes, regardless of the cost to the accused.
If this is what free speech in America now looks like, we’re all in more trouble than we realize.
Lauren Noble is the founder and executive director of the Buckley Institute.
English (US)