Yale free speech expert says America is in ‘trouble’
A Yale free speech expert says she was arrested over false accusations that she used a racial slur, and warns that her experience “should terrify anyone who values free speech and due process.”
‘The case was a farce from the start’
Lauren Noble is the founder and executive director of Yale’s Buckley Institute, whose mission is to “promote intellectual diversity and freedom of speech at Yale University.” In an op-ed published in the New York Post last week, Noble said she was arrested, jailed, and prosecuted last year for calling a man a “n*gger,” even though she never uttered the word. The case against her was dropped in late March for lack of evidence.
The saga began last May when a Black New Haven parking attendant named Gerno Allen accused Noble of calling him a “n*gger” on three separate occasions in 2023. Noble denied doing so, but was nonetheless arrested and charged with three counts of disorderly conduct. Police refused to check the parking lot’s surveillance tapes, which ultimately showed that no such interactions took place. Noble says she was handcuffed and jailed over the false accusations.
Mainstream media pounced on the story, eagerly painting Noble, who is Right-wing, as a racist. Some media operatives tried to get Noble fired by reaching out to her employer.
“The case was a farce from the start: There were no threats, no violence — just a made-up accusation, rubber-stamped by a system that didn’t bother to check basic facts before putting someone’s life through a meat grinder,” Noble wrote in the op-ed last week.
‘We’re all in more trouble than we realize’
In March, State Attorney Jacqueline Fitzgerald moved to drop the charges against Noble because the State could “not prove [the] case beyond a reasonable doubt.” Allen’s lawyer, Erskine McIntosh, said he was “profoundly disappointed” that the charges were dismissed and complained about “the caste system in this country,” even though surveillance footage contradicted Allen’s testimony.
“My experience should terrify anyone who values free speech and due process,” Noble wrote. “In America, we’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty — not guilty until you can scrape together enough money, time and evidence to clear your name.”
She received no apology from Allen, his employer, or law enforcement.
“Not from the prosecutor who entertained this blatantly unconstitutional charade, and not from the media outlets that treated an unproven allegation as fact. The media didn’t seek out the truth. They just repeated one lie after another, eager to convict me in the court of public opinion.”
Noble says media corporations have yet to update their original stories, and it was weeks before they bothered to report the dismissal of the charges against her.
“The real systemic problem,” Noble concluded, “is a criminal-justice system that rushes to judgment, punishes the innocent and works on a sluggish timeline to correct its own mistakes, regardless of the cost to the accused.
“If this is what free speech in America now looks like, we’re all in more trouble than we realize.”
