CLAYTON — Two activists who participated in a pro-Palestine protest last spring at Washington University now face charges, the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney’s office said Wednesday.
Those charged include Jill Stein, the presidential nominee of the Green Party in 2024, who is accused of hitting a police officer with a bicycle and kicking him at the protest. Stein, 74, was charged Friday with first-degree trespass and fourth-degree assault.
In charging documents, Washington University police said demonstrators were given numerous warnings to leave the university’s private campus. Officers moved in for arrests around 8 p.m. Court documents alleged Stein interlocked her arms with other demonstrators and refused to leave.
In an interview with the Post-Dispatch just days after the protest, Stein disputed accounts that she struck an officer.
“While I was being assaulted with a bicycle, one of the police bent down and picked up my foot in order to try to further destabilize me into falling backwards,” Stein said. “And I wiggled out of his grip, you know, in an effort not to fall back on my head.”
But I knew, before the election and beyond a reasonable doubt, that that would not happen. That leaves me with the three choices mentioned above: keeping genocide the same, increasing genocide, or abdicating responsibility for choosing between the two.
And to be clear, I'm not very high on the genocide list. I will likely escape to a less horrible country before my number is drawn. It's my LGBT+, Chicano, and indigenous comrades I'm most worried about, followed by a long list of other traditionally marginalized groups.