In 2024, David Piegaro attended a pro-Palestine rally on Princeton University’s campus as a self-described “citizen journalist.” A Jewish student from Trenton, New Jersey, he had enrolled at Princeton as an undergraduate after six years of service in the U.S. Army and the New Jersey National Guard. By the time he arrived, the scene at the rally was already chaotic.
Video of the scene shows a group of students swarming a bus, wedging safety cones in the wheels to stop it from moving, and banging and shouting: “Let them go!” Inside sat two Princeton students who had been arrested for trespassing after barricading themselves inside a building. The bus was supposed to escort them to the police station, but Princeton released the students after about an hour.
After watching all this from a distance, Piegaro began to follow and videotape Princeton professor Max Weiss, who Piegaro recognized as a leader of a pro-Palestine faculty group, and another man wearing a suit. When Piegaro tried to enter a building with them, the man with the suit essentially shoved him down the stairs, alleges Piegaro.
He was arrested at the bottom of the steps and charged with assault, trespassing, resisting arrest, and obstruction. The man in the suit was Kenneth Strother, Princeton’s assistant vice president for public safety. In a sworn statement, Strother said that he was the victim and that Piegaro fell down the stairs only because he had resisted arrest.
In April, a New Jersey judge found Piegaro not guilty of all the charges, concluding that he might “have been unwise, or even defiant, but it does not amount to reckless disregard.”
On Wednesday, Piegaro filed a lawsuit against Princeton and Strother in a federal court in New Jersey, alleging violations of his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights, use of excessive force, wrongful imprisonment, fabrication of evidence, and more. While the suit doesn’t allege discrimination under Title IV of the Higher Education Act, Piegaro told us that “it was very obvious that I was treated differently from the other students who were arrested the same day that had a different outcome.”
