Protest photographer Alexa Wilkinson has been charged with a felony hate crime for allegedly sharing social media posts criticizing New York Times staff and for documenting activists who vandalized the media company’s headquarters in protest of its coverage of Israel.
Wilkinson, who is credited on protest images circulated widely by groups including the New York American Civil Liberties Union and Writers Against the War in Gaza (WAWOG), was arrested yesterday, September 28, according to public court records.
A spokesperson for the Legal Aid Society, which is representing Wilkinson, told Hyperallergic that Wilkinson is a “respected photojournalist with no criminal record.”
“They did not participate in or encourage any unlawful activity, and the charge against them is wholly unfounded,” the spokesperson said. “We remind the public that they are entitled to the presumption of innocence and are confident that once the facts are made known, it will be evident they were simply doing their job as a journalist.”
Wilkinson, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, was charged with one count of Aggravated Harassment in the Second Degree as a Hate Crime. Police cited Wilkinson’s presence as a photographer at an incident of vandalism at the New York Times headquarters in Manhattan on July 30, as well as their alleged reposting of social media comments critical of Times staff members with alleged pro-Israel bias or connections.
Wilkinson pleaded not guilty in a preliminary hearing this morning, September 29. Their next scheduled court appearance is November 17.
On July 30, anonymous protesters vandalized the facade of the Times’s headquarters in Midtown using red paint, accusing the media company of enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza as characterized by a United Nations commission this month. Wilkinson took photos of the incident and shared them on social media. A complaint shared with Hyperallergic by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office cites surveillance footage of Wilkinson photographing the vandalism.
Two other individuals were arraigned on felony charges this morning for allegedly vandalizing the Times building and contributing to $107,599.54 in property damages, according to complaints obtained by Hyperallergic. They were not charged with hate crimes.
The complaint also accuses Wilkinson of posting “a threatening social media message targeting the Jewish editor of the New York Times,” as summarized in a court record. Wilkinson allegedly shared screenshots of an X post that read “They hanged newspaper editors at Nuremberg.” The complaint said Wilkinson captioned the screenshots with the phrase “Looking at you [Joseph Kahn],” referring to the Times’s executive editor. Another post attributed to Wilkinson criticized conservative Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens, who has denied that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. Hyperallergic has not independently verified the existence of the posts.
Last month, protesters doused Kahn’s apartment building in red paint in an unrelated action, which prosecutors referenced during Wilkinson’s hearing even though the photographer has not been charged with any involvement in that incident.
The complaint against Wilkinson, written by a New York Police Department (NYPD) detective, cites a TikTok post by an account allegedly belonging to the photographer, featuring footage of the vandalism overlayed with graphics of Times reporters and their alleged pro-Zionist biases or connections to Israeli institutions. The infographics come from a database compiled by WAWOG’s protest publication New York War Crimes.
The database accuses Executive Editor Kahn of overseeing a newsroom that “ignored Israel’s systematic assassination of over two hundred Palestinian journalists.” Other entries highlighted one reporter covering Israel-Palestine affairs who publicly stated that he served in the Israeli military.
The New York Times has not responded to Hyperallergic’s requests for comment.
WAWOG is not alone in accusing the New York Times of pro-Israel bias. This summer, an investigation by the Intercept found that the Times repeated Israel’s claim that Hamas was stealing aid nearly two dozen times before Israeli military officials eventually refuted the allegation. Last year, the Intercept also reported on a leaked internal memo from Times editors instructing reporters to avoid the terms “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory” in their coverage.
Last summer, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office charged videographer Samuel Seligson, a freelance journalist, with a felony hate crime related to documenting the vandalism of Brooklyn Museum Director Anne Pasternak’s home. Seligson’s attorney claimed at the time that he had been working as a credentialed press member and had not participated in the vandalism. Seligson is scheduled to appear in court next month.
In a statement today, WAWOG condemned the recent arrests as “an attack on our movement and an attempt to criminalize both journalistic and political speech,” and drew attention to the reported 240 journalists who have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces.
