Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein on Sunday alleged police assaulted her and other demonstrators shortly before being arrested at a pro-Palestinian protest on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis.
“Basically, the police charged us despite our efforts to de-escalate, they charged us with bicycles. And you’ll see … plenty of footage of that around the internet,” Stein said Sunday on NewsNation’s “NewsNation Prime.” “They basically used their bicycles as a weapon to push us back, to push us over onto our backs.”
Stein was among more than 80 people arrested Saturday after the demonstrators “refused to leave after being asked multiple times,” according to a statement from the Washington University in St. Louis.
“In my case, one of the officers actually lifted up one of my feet, you can see in some of this footage, where I’m basically being thrown backward, like onto my head, and I wiggled out of that assault, and was told by the officer that I was assaulting him, which is absolutely ludicrous.”
Stein said she was charged with assaulting an officer and told NewsNation she has “really sore” ribs.
She said she was expecting to go to the emergency room to check for a rib fracture after she claimed the police “rammed” the handles of their bikes into the demonstrators’ chests and rib cages.
Protests calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war have roiled college campuses for days, prompting the arrests of hundreds of student and faculty demonstrators across the country.
Stein’s campaign account posted a video of the candidate being escorted off campus by two police officers, with her hands apparently tied behind her back. Her campaign said she was arrested along with her campaign manager, Jason Call, and deputy campaign manager, Kelly Merrill-Caye.
She and the other protesters were released around 2 a.m. on Sunday from the St. Louis County Jail, her campaign stated.
Washington University in St. Louis said the protesters arrived on campus on Saturday “with the intention of causing a significant disruption to the university.” The group began to set up a camp in violation of university policy, and school officials “made the decision to tell everyone present that they needed to leave.”
The Hill reached out to Washington University in St. Louis for comment.
Stein said she felt “enormous solidarity” with the student protesters.
“Because they’re the ones who really are risking everything right now to demand a kind of a moral response to this moral emergency and this genocide, which is rolling out every day on our video screens and on our iPhones,” she said.
“I felt so much respect for them that they are risking their ability to stay in the university, to graduate, to have their credits, to maintain their housing — they have put it all on the line in order to challenge a system that is fundamentally not serving us. In particular, they are challenging the university … to divest from Boeing, in particular, with whom the university has large contracts,” she added later.
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