Minute-by-Minute: Inside The Out-Of-Control Protest at Yale Law School

On March 10, 2022, a protest at Yale Law School—just ranked (again) this week as the #1 law school in the U.S.—got horrendously out of hand.

The background: Yale’s Federalist Society had invited two lawyers of antithetical ideologies to speak about Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, a legal case about civil liberties that their respective organizations had been aligned on and won 8-1 at the Supreme Court.

Monica Miller is the legal director of the progressive American Humanist Society, and Kristen Waggoner is General Counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative faith-based non-profit that describes itself as “committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, marriage and family, and the sanctity of life” both in America around the world. ADF has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

It is unsurprising that a lawyer from the group might not be welcomed by the majority of the students at Yale, a leading progressive influence in the country’s culture wars.

But what happened both inside and outside the classroom after Miller and Waggoner arrived on campus on March 10 and tried to have a discussion about civil liberties—moderated by Professor Kate Stith (who told the students to “grow up”)—went far beyond the boundaries of a peaceful protest.

One hundred and twenty student protesters were sufficiently physically menacing that the police were called, and Miller and Waggoner were escorted hastily from the premises in a police car.

Accounts of what happened both during the session and after have varied, with Yale spokesperson Debra Kroszner initially brushing off the disruption by protesters as happening only at the outset at the hourlong session. “At the very start of the March 10 event, when students began to make noise, the moderator read the University’s free speech policy for the first time,” Kroszner said in a statement. “At that point, the students exited the event, and it went forward. When students made noise in the hallways, administrators and staff instructed students to stop. During this time, Yale Law School staff spoke to [Yale Police Department] officers who were already on hand about whether assistance might be needed in the event the students did not follow those instructions. Fortunately, that assistance was not needed and the event went forward until its conclusion.”

But, according to Waggoner (from whom you will hear below) and other eye-witnesses whose accounts I will share in subsequent newsletters, that is just plain wrong.

Grotesque behavior—including thumping on the walls, chanting, threats such as “Fight me, bitch,” and the giving of the middle finger—went on for over an hour. The floor shook, and other meetings and classes in the building were stopped. Remarkably the Dean of Students, Ellen Cosgrove, was apparently present in the classroom and did nothing.

It then took two weeks for the Dean of Yale Law School, Heather Gerken, to say publicly that what had happened was “unacceptable” in a statement that has been criticized by many for not going nearly far enough, including influential legal analyst (and Yale Law School alum) David Lat and Waggoner herself.

Yale and its law school have become infamous for campus protests that extend into more generalized culture wars across America. In recent years, there has been Halloween-gate; Dinner Party-gate, Trap House-gate, a fight over whether white male poets ought to be replaced on the English literature curriculum, a sit-in over the Kavanaugh hearings, and so on.

But while the debates on each topic are arguably essential, sources (who include current students, faculty, and alumni) tell me they have been greatly troubled by the increasing intolerance, intimidation, and bullying by the protestors—and by the seeming ineptitude of the faculty to exercise authority and genuinely encourage a culture of free speech on campus. One alum tells me he’s so fed up, he’s cut Yale out of his will. And in my next newsletter, I will publish a startling interview with a current Law School student about his thoughts on the events of March 10.

“I didn’t think it could get worse than when I was there, but apparently it has,” says Aaron Haviland, a former Federalist society member, who wrote in 2019 that he felt so unsafe on Yale’s campus, he was counting the days to graduation.

To date, there’s been precious little push back about the manner of the protests on campus from anyone who is supposed to be in charge. “I think they are frightened,” a former YLS graduate told me, saying that ten years ago the environment was much different.

But, this time, there was push back from outside—from a sphere which has the power to issue a direct hit to Yale Law School. Federal judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decided he’d had enough after Yale Law students demand their members sign a petition protesting that the calling of the police had been “unsafe” for the students. In an email to his fellow federal judges, Silberman wrote:

The latest events at Yale Law School, in which students attempted to shout down speakers participating in a panel discussion on free speech, prompt me to suggest that students who are identified as those willing to disrupt any such panel discussion should be noted. All federal judges—and all federal judges are presumably committed to free speech—should carefully consider whether any student so identified should be disqualified from potential clerkships.

I interviewed Waggoner to get the tick-tock of precisely what it felt like to be inside that classroom at Yale Law School on March 10.

I ask you: Is what you are about to read a description of the kind of behavior anyone wants at the top law school in this country?

Read the whole interview at Vicky Ward Investigates.

A Small-Town Polish Mayor and the Head of an Anti-Trafficking NGO on the Horrific Human Trafficking at Ukraine’s Borders

Yesterday, I was privileged to be on a zoom call with Wojciech Bakun, the mayor of Przemyśl (pronounced “Shemesh”), which is a provincial town of 60,000 people on the border between Poland and Ukraine. In the past four weeks, Przemyśl has become base camp for 1200 volunteers from all over the world who have received and cared for over 800,000 refugees— many of them arriving on foot and in danger of freezing to death.

Read more from Mayor Bakun as well as my interview with Deb O’Hara-Rusckowski, the President of the NGO Global Strategic Operatives, who told me about the challenges her organization is facing on the Ukrainian border at “Vicky Ward Investigates.”

Why is Israel So Slow to Support Ukraine? Ask Jared Kushner.

Three years ago, I published Kushner, Inc. In it, I told the extraordinary story of Jared Kushner’s foreign policy machinations—motivated, it appeared, less by national security concerns and more by the business concerns of the Kushner family’s real estate business, the priority of which was a trophy building with a $1.4 billion mortgage for which the debt was due in 2019, and thus the clock was ticking to find a foreign buyer who wanted to curry favor.

(Clearly Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, seems equally unaverse to trading in on his political connections abroad, but at least, unlike Kushner, he is not occupying any official capacity in this administration.)

Jared’s dabbling in U.S. foreign affairs, however, led to all sorts of new sucking up that—in the context of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia—looks even more remarkable (not in a good way) than it did at the time. Today, the U.S. is not even on speaking terms with of most Kushner’s best friends and now investors.

Read the rest. including an excerpt from Kushner, Inc., at “Vicky Ward Investigates.”

Where are the Russian Oligarchs? Ask Their Girlfriends, the “ROGs”

You’d think from the headlines all around the world that every sanctioned Russian oligarch has by now lost their super-yachts, their mansions, and their multi-national bank accounts and are living in social exile, their reputations severely tarnished.

And yet…

while the stories of supposed misery among the fabulously wealthy make for salacious reading, are they really indicative of mass financial suffering among Russia’s corrupt plutocracy? Or are they just gossipy headlines, serving a symbolic or political purpose rather than a substantive one? Most seriously of all: Could they even actually be counter-productive?

To find out what the oligarchs are really doing and thinking, I turned to what one might argue is the most reliable source of what is really going on: the “ROGs,” my invented acronym for the “Russian Oligarch Girlfriends.”

Read my full story at “Vicky Ward Investigates.”

Why Does it Matter if Juror 50 Lied in the Ghislaine Maxwell Trial?

Last week saw the critical hearing in the question of whether Ghislaine Maxwell will face a re-trial.

I thought that, given the information conveyed, the chance of a mistrial is high. (Both defense and prosecutors have to submit their briefs on the issue today.) But, according to my legal guru, David S. Weinstein, former AUSA for the Southern District of Florida-turned-litigator, what happened last Wednesday likely swings the judge’s ruling in favor of the prosecution. In other words, he’s reversed himself from what he’d told me previously. He says he now thinks it unlikely the judge will rule for a mistrial.

Read our full Q&A here.

March 8 is Critical in the Never-Ending Saga of Ghislaine Maxwell

March 8th will be a really important hearing in the never-ending saga of Ghislaine Maxwell, who, as my readers know, was convicted on five of six counts for aiding and participating in the sex trafficking and abuse of minors by the late Jeffrey Epstein.

As my readers also know, there is the chance that the trial could be deemed a mistrial.

This is all because Juror Number 50—who has asked to go by his first and middle names, Scotty David—gave media interviews after the verdict in which he said he was a victim of sexual abuse and had talked about that experience in the jury room. There had been at least two questions on the initial questionnaire for potential jurors asking if they or family members had suffered sexual abuse, and he said he could not recall how he had responded to either question. David is due in court on March 8th.

For the full story, read my Substack.

“There’s a Narrative in Russia That You Won’t Hear in the U.S. Media”

With Ukraine under siege from Russia, I thought it would be interesting to get the perspective of Russian rhythmic-gymnast-turned-supermodel Kira Dikhtyar, who has homes in both New York and Moscow. My readers will know Dikhtyar from her feature in “Chasing Ghislaine,” my recent podcast and documentary.

Dikhtyar graduated with a gold academic medal from Moscow State University, where she studied geography and geopolitics. In the wake of a violent sexual assault as a 15-year-old, Dikhtyar has been vocal about her experience and is lobbying the UN to universalize the age of consent. A dual U.S. and Russian citizen, she was in Moscow until last week. On the way to Moscow, she visited relatives in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev.

I wanted to get Dikhtyar’s take on the war, since the perspective that is perhaps missing from U.S. media coverage is that of Russian citizens. And Dikhtyar is in the relatively rare position of following the media narratives in both Russia and the U.S. She spoke to me from New York. Read our conversation at Substack.

“Putin was Playing Chess While the Rest of the World was Playing Checkers”

Three weeks ago, I discussed the situation in Ukraine with Lev Parnas. Parnas, remember, is the Ukrainian-American businessman who, with Russian-born businessman Igor Fruman, worked with Rudy Giuliani to achieve a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine for the Trump administration, essentially to try to target the Bidens. Parnas and Fruman’s efforts were stopped when, on October 9, 2019, both men were arrested and charged with federal campaign finance violations. Parnas subsequently blew the whistle on much of the clandestine operation around the time Congress held impeachment hearings over the matter.

The last time I spoke with him, Parnas told me he thought Russian President Vladimir Putin was posturing and would not invade Ukraine.

Now, Parnas explains why the picture has changed. I spoke to him hours after Putin, in a rambling speech, declared two Ukrainian states—Donetsk and Luhansk—to be “independent” despite parts being under Ukrainian control, and President Joe Biden consequently announced the “first tranche” of sanctions including full blocking sanctions on two significant Russian financial institutions (which collectively hold over $80 billion in assets) and on five Russian elites and their family members.

Read our conversation on my Substack.

Jean-Luc Brunel’s Suicide Shuts One of the Main Doors to Unraveling the Mysteries of Jeffrey Epstein

With the apparent prison suicide of Jean-Luc Brunel—the owner of the model agency MC2 and a business associate of Jeffrey Epstein—early Saturday, one of the main doors to unraveling the mysteries that still surround Epstein, two and half years after Epstein’s own controversial suicide, just closed.

Just as many people hoped, in vain, that Epstein’s former girlfriend and now convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell might speak up, Brunel was seen as someone who would, potentially, have a lot of answers.

Now that that door’s been closed—in a way that’s eerily reminiscent of Epstein’s own death— the number of people under pressure to talk is dwindling.

Prince Andrew Settles to Keep Giuffre Case Out of the Courts

As I wrote last week, I have bounced a lot of the legal activity around the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell off of former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida-turned-litigator David S. Weinstein, who has been a wise sounding board. I asked him about today’s news that Prince Andrew has settled with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who had accused him of sexual abuse when she was a minor. In just weeks, Andrew was scheduled to give a deposition.

Read my conversation with Weinstein, condensed for clarity, on my Substack.