Nisreen Khokhar, Jessie Rubin and Courtland Buchanan, who were arrested as students at a May 7, 2025, anti-Israel takeover of Butler Library on Columbia University’s campus, sued Columbia on Sept. 18, alleging that guards unlawfully confined and assaulted them before having them arrested.
In the complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the trio alleges that the three “participated in a brief teach-in demonstration at Butler Library” and that the university’s safety officers “kettled, confined and repeatedly and violently assaulted plaintiffs and hundreds of other students and bystanders for several hours” before the plaintiffs were arrested.
“The complaint describes May 7 as a ‘brief teach-in.’ That’s one way to put it,” Mark Goldfeder, CEO and director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told JNS.
“It was reading week, and the room they took over was full of students studying for finals,” Goldfeder said. “The demonstrators came in masked, a crowd outside broke through the library’s front door and Columbia says two of its safety officers were hurt in the crush.”
Columbia stated at the time that protesters refused repeated instructions to identify themselves and leave. The university called in the New York City Police Department.
“The protesters renamed the reading room after Basel al-Araj, who appears in the complaint as ‘a Palestinian writer and educator.’ Maybe, but he was also killed in a gunfight with Israeli forces in 2017 after the Palestinian Authority had charged him with weapons possession and planning attacks,” Goldfeder said. “You can learn a lot about a case from what its lawyers hoped you wouldn’t Google.”
The plaintiffs allege that security personnel locked the exits and conditioned their departure upon presenting university identification. The complaint states that 17 students showed identification and left, and the remaining 81 people were arrested.
Goldfeder told JNS that “if Columbia’s guards actually locked doors on students who were asking to leave, that gets litigated on the facts, and it should be. Nobody forfeits the right against false imprisonment because their politics are ugly.”
“The trouble is that the complaint keeps answering itself,” he said. “Anyone who swiped an ID walked right out, 17 students did exactly that, and the plaintiffs who refused ended up pleading guilty.”
The three pleaded guilty to administrative disorderly conduct violations, according to their complaint. Columbia later imposed two-year suspensions without guaranteed re-enrollment.
The students also alleged that federal pressure from the Trump administration over Columbia’s handling of campus Jew-hatred transformed the university’s conduct into government action. The Trump administration had canceled over $400 million in federal grants and contracts before reaching agreement with the school in July 2025.
“The bigger theory, that the Trump administration’s funding pressure somehow turned a private university into an arm of the government, is just for the press release,” Goldfeder told JNS. “Courts have said for decades that federal money and federal pressure don’t make a private school’s decisions state action unless the government forced the specific choice, and Columbia spent months negotiating its own deal, which is what an institution making its own decisions looks like.”
The lawsuit alleges false imprisonment, excessive force, breach of contract and violations of the First, Fourth and 14th Amendments.
Brooke Goldstein, founder of the Lawfare Project, told JNS that “this lawsuit is yet another brazen attempt by activists who broke the law at Columbia University to portray themselves as victims and to expand civil rights law to protect themselves from the consequences of their actions.”
“Some of their claims are even too late, brought after the statute of limitations expired,” she said.
“In 2025, two federal civil rights offices found that Columbia had acted with deliberate indifference to the harassment of Jewish students, including by failing to enforce its own rules on campus protests,” Goldstein told JNS.
“At Butler Library, Columbia finally enforced those rules,” she said. “Civil rights law exists to protect students from discrimination and harassment, not to protect the people who broke the rules and the law.”
A spokesman for the university told JNS that the school is aware of the lawsuit. “The Butler Library disruption took place during the final exam reading period. Individuals participating were repeatedly asked for identification and to leave and were warned that they were in violation of our rules and policies,” the spokesman said. “The university cannot tolerate such disruptions to our academic activities.
“Faculty and staff who serve on the University Judicial Board and as part of the Office of Rules Administration provide an indispensable service to the university, and we could not be more grateful for their work,” the university spokesman told JNS. “We are also grateful to our public safety team for their continuous efforts to maintain a safe environment for teaching, learning and study.”
