NYC Videographer Who Filmed Vandalism is Arrested on Hate Crime Charges
A New York City videographer was arrested on felony hate charges after reportedly filming the vandalism of homes by a group of pro-Palestinian protestors.
31-year-old videographer Samuel Seligson — who has licensed and sold footage to Reuters, ABC News, and the New York Post — was arrested by the New York Police Department (NYPD) on Tuesday.
Seligson, who is based in New York City, was taken into custody in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and now faces two counts of felony hate crimes and criminal mischief charges.
According to AP News, Seligson was arrested on charges that he accompanied a group of pro-Palestinian protesters as they hurled red paint and spray-painted anti-Zionist graffiti at homes belonging to top leaders of the Brooklyn Museum in June.
According to a criminal complaint written by a police detective, Seligson traveled with the group of vandals as they defaced the facades of two apartments belonging to the museum’s director and president.
The activists are accused of spray-painting doors and sidewalks with messages that accused the two leaders of supporting genocide. A banner hung at the home of the museum’s Jewish president called her a “white-supremacist Zionist.”
AP News reports that while the complaint described Seligson as a participant in the crime, an anonymous law enforcement official told the outlet that the videographer was not directly involved in the spray-painting or property damage.
However, police sources told The New York Post that Seligson helped the vandals load their equipment, drove to the scenes with them, trespassed on private property, and wasn’t wearing press credentials during the incidents.
Is This The First Arrest of Its Kind in the US?
Seligson’s arrest has drawn condemnation from press freedom groups, while also raising questions about the rights of a journalist in the U.S. to document illegal activity.
“Samuel [Seligson] is being charged for alleged behavior that is protected by the First Amendment and consistent with his job as a credentialed member of the press,” the videographer’s attorney Leena Widdi says.
“What is even more concerning, however, is that this member of the press is being charged with a hate crime.”
The Freedom of the Press Foundation also described Seligson’s arrest as “alarming” and an attempt to “criminalize journalism.”
According to HyperAllergic, Seligson’s arrest may be among the first of its kind in the United States, according to the US Press Freedom Tracker, which has not recorded any other incidents of journalists being charged with hate crimes.
In order to prove a hate crime charge, prosecutors would have to show that Seligson participated in the vandalism and was targeting the directors because of their religion, race, or other personal characteristics.
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
