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.
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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.
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Yet for nearly a year, I lived under a cloud of suspicion.
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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.
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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.
{snip}
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