In New Haven, Connecticut, home to Yale University, a conservative woman spent a year embroiled in the criminal justice system based on the allegation that she had hurled a racial slur at someone. Ultimately, the case was dismissed because videos proved her innocence, but the whole case perfectly illustrates how leftists are destroying free speech by redefining the line between speech and violence.
Lauren Noble, the founder of the Buckley Institute, which exists to “promot[e] intellectual diversity at Yale University,” was arrested a year ago. The charge? She allegedly used a racial slur against a parking attendant:
The charges stem from incidents that occurred on July 6, July 13 and July 27 in 2023.
The parking attendant, Gerno Allen, who is a Black man, told police Noble called him a racist slur when he encountered her alone on July 6 and July 13, 2023 at the 58 Wall St. parking lot where he worked, according to the warrant for the woman’s arrest.
He claimed Noble called him the same racist slur again on July 27, 2023 after his manager spoke to her about him, the warrant said.
“We would not be at this point, right here in time, if I would have got the proper apology right out the gate,” Allen said in an interview.
“Everybody has a bad day, but it’s not the bad days or the issues or problems that you have, it’s how you deal with them,” the New Haven resident said.
“For you to just come out and be disrespectful like that, that means you’ve done that plenty of times before and nobody said anything,” Allen said.
“If somebody does something wrong, they should be held accountable,” Allen added, when asked what he would want people to take from his case.
There were a few problems with this allegation and her subsequent arrest and prosecution. As Noble explains in an essay she wrote for the New York Post,
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.
[snip]
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.
Indeed, to the extent there was a racial element in the case, the accuser probably identified the wrong woman—something police and the prosecutor should have realized right away:
The prosecution [in asking to have the case dismissed] said video showed Noble had no interaction with Allen on two of the dates he claimed Noble made the comments to him — July 6 and July 13, 2023.
The video from July 6, 2023, showed Gerno had an interaction with another woman who, like Noble, is white, but driving a different car, Fitzgerald told the court.
No wonder, then, that the prosecutor was forced to ask the Court to dismiss the case.
For Noble, the case was a staggering blow to her finances and quality of life:
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.
Nobel believes that animosity to conservatism and the very idea of free speech drove the case:
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. (Emphasis mine.)
I’m sure Noble is right. But there’s something equally sinister going on here, and it has to do with the way the left routinely says that speech is violence. What it really means, of course, is that speech with which it disagrees is violence. The flip side is that it always argues that its violence is speech.
But let’s look at that “speech is violence” idea. Some speech is tantamount to violence. If I were to threaten you with imminent death or other physical harm, that is actionable speech, because no system forces intended victims to wait until they’re broken or dead to report a crime. Likewise, if I were to threaten to assassinate a politician, that too is violent speech that is tantamount to the act, because a society cannot afford to wait to see if someone makes good on the threat.
In this case, though, the charge is only that the woman, whoever it was, used a racial pejorative and, maybe, stamped her foot. There is no indication in the reporting that the parking lot attendant felt threatened. Nevertheless, New Haven authorities conflated his racially hurt feelings with being the victim of actual violence.
Kids in New Haven had better not chant “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” In New Haven, insulting words, at least racially insulting ones, are given the totemic power of actions and are dragged out of the First Amendment’s protections. This is a dangerous precedent, and one all Americans should protest.
Image by Freepik.