Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen was arrested last week at a protest in Washington, D.C., supporting Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange.
Cohen, like his company, has never shied away from political and cultural movements, and his arrest last Thursday was the latest example.
The co-founder of the Vermont-based ice cream brand shared his support for Assange, who has been the target of prosecution in the U.S. While outside the Department of Justice building, Cohen said that the treatment of Assange was an attack on freedom
Cohen was joined by the feminist activist group CODEPINK and the group’s co-founder Jodie Evans. Cohen and Evans were both arrested for blocking the entrance to the building as they refused to move from their seats on the pathway for nearly an hour.
Video of the protest shows Cohen’s arrest in the pouring rain and the ice cream company founder lighting a sign on fire that read “Freedom of the Press.”
“Freedom of the press is going up in smoke,” he said as he watched the sign burn.
He then continued, saying that Assange being prosecuted means there is no such thing as freedom of the press.
“There’s no democracy without freedom of the press because the press is the only thing that can hold government accountable,” Cohen said.
The Wikileaks publisher is currently in the U.K., being held in a high-security facility in southeast London. He is still waiting to be extradited to the U.S., where federal prosecutors want him for his alleged violations of the Espionage Act.
Assange was indicted on 18 criminal counts after the site published thousands of pages of classified documents that contain information about the Iraq war and Guantanamo Bay between 2010 and 2011.
Despite this, Cohen shared during the protest that the prosecution of Assange was “outrageous.”
“Julian Assange is nonviolent. He is presumed innocent. And yet somehow or other, he has been imprisoned in solitary confinement for four years. That is torture,” Cohen said at the protest. “He revealed the truth, and for that, he is suffering, and we need to do whatever we can to help him.”
In the U.S., Assange could face up to 175 years in prison if he is convicted of his crimes and sentenced to the maximum limit.
Cohen was eventually released on Thursday, according to a tweet he shared. He also called on President Joe Biden to “follow through with his promise” and not seek charges against Assange.
“If you’re trying to [fight] an issue of injustice, you can scream and yell, you can write, but the ultimate thing you can do is get arrested for it — to disobey the unjust law,” Cohen told a reporter as he sat in the pathway to the DOJ building entrance. “So that’s what I’m doing, and I feel good about it.”
Cohen’s arrest came just days after his company made headlines for its Fourth of July tweet that said the U.S. was founded on stolen land and that it should be given back.
“Ah, the Fourth of July. Who doesn’t love a good parade, some tasty barbecue, and a stirring fireworks display?” Ben & Jerry’s wrote in a blog post. “The only problem with all that, though, is that it can distract from an essential truth about this nation’s birth: The US was founded on stolen Indigenous land.”
However, not everyone supported the message from Ben & Jerry’s, with some calling for the company to receive the “Bud Light treatment.”
Others said that the ice cream company should lead by example and giveback the land its factory in Vermont is on first.
“Your factory is on stolen land,” one person tweeted. “Native Americans, primarily from the Abenaki tribe, have lived in Vermont for 10,000 years. In 1609, French explorer Samuel de Champlain was the first European to set foot in Vermont.”
If consumers boycott the ice cream brand, it wouldn’t be the first time, as Ben & Jerry’s also faced boycotts when it said it wouldn’t sell its products in Israel’s “Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The territory it was referring to is the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
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