It’s never a good look for a presidential candidate to be arrested, is it? But that just seems to be par the course this year.
In this case, the arrestee is Jill Stein, the liberal Green Party’s chosen candidate.
Stein was attending an anti-Israel protest at Washington University in St. Louis on Saturday. As things of this nature tend to do, they got out of hand. And before you know it, Stein and 79 others were put in handcuffs, a cop car, and then a jail cell, according to KDSK-TV in St. Louis.
BREAKING: Jill Stein and her Campaign Manager and Deputy Campaign Manager, Jason Call and Kelly Merrill-Cayer, have been arrested at Washington University in St. Louis while supporting a protest against WashU’s ties to the war on Gaza.
Video from @KallieECox pic.twitter.com/rkUYC9b5Qx— Dr. Jill Stein🌻 (@DrJillStein) April 28, 2024
Stein was charged with assault and trespassing.
According to the station, she was booked into jail just before 7:30 p.m. on Saturday and released on Sunday at 1:30 a.m.
Of course, Stein thought she was the real victim here and claimed she’d been assaulted, not the other way around.
“I sat a long time sitting alone in a cell, and I had no idea – ‘Did anybody even know I was there?’ I was separated from the group, and I was like, ‘Am I going be there all night or in here for a week?” she said.
The video doesn’t exactly back her story, though.
Green Party politician Jill Stein ASSAULTS police officers by pushing a bicycle into them as they tried to push crowds back at Washington University in St Louis.
Stein was arrested shortly after and taken away with her hands tied with zip cuffs. pic.twitter.com/gYxdb2TJip
— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) April 28, 2024
Neither do statements from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which posit the idea that it was outsiders like Stein and her group that pushed the protest to upheaval and violence rather than the students who organized it.
From an interview before her arrest at Washington University: pic.twitter.com/IaaiWcpsIq
— Kallie Cox (@KallieECox) April 28, 2024
Of course, this is all just more fuel for the fire of her particular brand of radicalism.
