Law Dean Called For Arrested Reporter’s Release

Intrepid Brazilian reporter Claudia Trevisan dealt with the authorities in North Korea. She dealt with state security while pursuing stories in China. None of that compared to dealing with cops on Yale campus when she came here to report a story — and ended up in handcuffs, then incarcerated in the police station pokey.

Trevisan, the U.S. correspondent for the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de S.Paulo, came to New Haven last Thursday to try to interview her country’s Supreme Court president, Minister Joaquim Barbosa. Barbosa was appearing at a private, hush-hush annual Yale Law School “Global Constitutionalism Seminar” featuring a host of leading international legal figures as well as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

A Yale police officer ordered her handcuffed and arrested after she had walked upstairs in Woolsey Hall to where Barbosa was participating in one of the seminar’s sessions.

“I had problems with the police” while serving as her paper’s China correspondent for five years, Trevisan said Sunday in a tear-filled interview with the Independent. “But never remotely like what happened to me at Yale.” Trevisan recently moved to Washington, D.C., to cover her paper’s American beat.

The arrest this weekend gained international attention and provoked outrage.

It also apparently led Yale Law School Dean Robert Post to ask police to release her and have charges against her dropped as soon as he learned of the incident, according to a statement released Sunday night by the university.

That statement—the second issued in two days by Yale—and the interview with Trevisan provided new details about the incident, with Yale defending its police’s actions and calling the handcuffing of the reporter “standard procedure.” (Update: The Brazilian consular general blasted the arrest Monday, in an interview Monday. Read about that here.)

A New Assignment

Trevisan originally planned to cover the ongoing debates at the United Nations last Thursday involving the U.S. and Iran. Then her editor from Brazil contacted her. He had learned that Minister Barbosa would be speaking at the Yale conference. He asked Trevisan to travel to New Haven to interview him.

Barbosa has been at the center of an ongoing scandal in Brazil over corruption involving government officials and other prominent figures. He has taken a leading role in trying to clean up the courts; read about that here.

He wasn’t the only high-security figure involved in the Yale event. Besides Breyer, other guests included a former president of Colombia’s Constitutional Court, the first-ever Jewish woman to sit on Canada’s Supreme Court, the third-ever female judge on Italy’s Constitutional Court. But Barbosa was enough of a security concern that Yale didn’t include his name in any materials about the event, including the program. In fact, the program schedule didn’t even mention Barbosa’s session. (Read the program here.) Yale didn’t publicize the event at all. Yale law students and professors did receive a Sept. 5 email informing them of the three-day seminar, with a partial schedule of events they could attend. (That schedule also omitted the event with Barbosa.)

Trevisan hopped a train to New Haven. She contacted Yale Law School press officer Jan Conroy, who informed her the event was closed to the press and she could not cover it. (Both she and Yale agree on that fact.)

“I told her, ‘He’s a public person. His salary is paid by the state. I thought we had all the right to know where he is and what he has done,” Trevisan said. She said that she’d stand out on the sidewalk to catch him if necessary.

After the conversation, she emailed Conroy a follow-up message.

“Believe me, I would rather not stand on the sidewalk of Yale, my newspaper in Brazil really wants me to do this. As I mention, minister Joaquim Barbosa e a public figure in Brazil and has just participated in the most important corruption that ever reached our Supreme Court,” she wrote to Conroy. “I would appreciate if the organizers of the event could let him know that I will be there and would like very much to talk with him. I have been a journalist for 28 years, was correspondent in Buenos Aires, New York and China, before coming to Washington. And I have studied Law at University of São Paulo.

“Thank you for any help you can give me.”

“Thank you, Claudia. I am forwarding this to the conference organizer right now,” Conroy emailed back.

Meanwhile, Trevisan called the personal cell phone number of Minister Barbosa himself. (She said the newspaper had his number.) She said she reached him. (No one answered calls the Independent placed to Barbosa’s cell phone Sunday evening.)

“He was very polite. I said, ‘Minister, I’m on the train on my way to Yale’” Trevisan recalled. “He said, ‘I don’t want to talk. It’s not your time to talk.’”

“I respect your decision. I need to be there anyway. I will be outside in case you change your mind,” Trevisan said she told him.

She had no intention of returning to New York. She had an assignment to complete.

“I had no intention to attend the seminar itself. I knew I was not welcomed. But I needed to make sure to know on which sidewalk to wait.”

Criminal Reporting

She went hunting for that sidewalk upon her arrival around 3:30 Thursday afternoon in New Haven. She went to Yale Law’s main Wall Street building. The security guard let her in, didn’t ask for ID, Trevisan said. She hunted around the building, learned the event wasn’t taking place there.

She consulted the three-day conference schedule her editor had sent her. It didn’t list Barbosa’s event. But it did list an alternative location for one of Saturday’s planned events: Woolsey Hall. So she went there to check it out.

She entered the rotunda, then started climbing the stairs. She ran into a Yale cop.

“Is the global seminar held here?” she said she asked him.

She said he asked who she was and what she wanted. She showed the officer her passport. She didn’t identify herself as a reporter. Yale’s statement said she identified herself as “a friend” of Barbosa. She said she told the officer she knew Barbosa and wanted “to talk to him.”

“That was a mistake,” Trevisan acknowledged in the interview, about her decision not to identify herself immediately as a reporter. “But not [something] to be arrested for.”

She never tried to enter the seminar room itself, she said. Nor did she argue with the officer about her right to be there, she said; nor did she disobey any commands at that point to leave. Yale’s two statements do not suggest otherwise.

It turned out the officer already knew about Trevisan, about how she told the law school she was a reporter coming to the event determined to interview Barbosa. The officer asked her to leave. She complied, she said; he escorted her out of the building.

As they walked out the door, she asked for her passport back. The officer refused to return it.

At that point, Trevisan acknowledged, “I lost my temper.”

“You cannot do that,” she told the officer.

“I can,” she said he responded. “We know who you are. You are a reporter. We have your picture. You were told several times not to come here.”

She said she had been told once that she could not cover the event.

“You are going to be arrested for criminal trespassing,” the officer informed her. He called for two policewomen to come to the scene. Trevisan called the Brazilian embassy.

The officer in charge then handcuffed her and and kept her at the scene for about an hour, she said. She said he refused to allow her to make any more phone calls. She was taken to 1 Union Ave., the police lock-up, charged with first-degree criminal trespass, fingerprinted, and kept behind bars until 9:20 p.m. before being released on a promise to appear in court this coming Friday.

”I was searched and put in a cell, with a metal bed and a toilet, visible from the outside. At the other cells, women screamed and banged the walls. When I had to pee, I had to do so with male guards walking on the corridor. Although it was a female section, the security is made by men,” Trevisan later wrote in a blog post about the incident.

“As far as I know, being a journalist is not a crime under America law.”

“Standard Procedure”

But entering private property without permission is a violation of the law, technically. One for which Yale chose to arrest her.

Yale defended that decision in two official statements this weekend. The second was released Sunday night after requests for more details in response to Trevisan’s version—and to questions about why it was necessary to arrest her and handcuff her rather than merely escort her from Woolsey Hall.

“Ms. Trevisan sought to gain entry to the private gathering by misrepresenting herself to the Yale Police officer who was providing security at the event, claiming to be ‘‘looking for a friend,’” the statement read. “The event was being held in a private room in a university building outside the law school. Although the first floor of this building is generally accessible to the public, this event was taking place on the second floor in a private room. Staff who were present identified Ms. Trevisan as having previously been informed of the private nature of the event. 

“Because of her attempts to enter the private meeting and because she misrepresented her intentions to a police officer, Ms. Trevisan was escorted from the building and arrested for trespassing.

“As a matter of standard procedure, she was handcuffed.”

Another Brazilian reporter sought to cover the event, as well, according to the Yale statement. “He agreed respectfully to wait on public property to interview those participants who wished to speak to the press.”

The Yale statement suggested that not everyone on campus necessarily agreed with the arrest.

“When Yale Law School Dean Robert Post was informed that an arrest had taken place, he immediately requested that Ms. Trevisan be released and that the charges be dropped,” according to the statement. It didn’t elaborate. Reached Sunday night, Post also declined to be quoted further on the matter.

An earlier version of this story follows:

Yale plans to seek having charges dropped against a Brazilian reporter its police arrested for trying to cover a campus event featuring her country’s Supreme Court president.

Yale police arrested the reporter, Claudia Trevisan (pictured), on a first-degree criminal trespass charge Thursday at Woolsey Hall.

She committed a crime reporters commit every day: Walking through buildings trying to find out where hush-hush events are taking place and then trying to catch a public figure on the way in or out.

Yale said in a statement that it did not “mistreat” Trevisan “in any way.”

The president of Brazil’s Supreme Court, Joaquim Barbosa, was on campus for a private Yale Law School event, a “Global Constitutionalism Seminar.” The school did not publicize the event. Barbosa has received international attention for taking on corruption in his nation’s legal system.

Trevisan, a U.S.-based correspondent for Brazil’s O Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper, caught wind of the event. She contacted Yale law’s public relations office, which informed her she could not cover it, she wrote in this blog post.

Here’s what she said happened next:

She was able to enter the law school’s main Wall Street building around 3:30 p.m. and look around for the event. It wasn’t there. She followed a trail to Woolsey Hall. She went inside.

A Yale cop stopped her and questioned her. She did not identify herself as a reporter; she said she was looking for Barbosa to speak with him and was planning to wait outside for him.

The officer asked her for her passport. He escorted her outside. She asked for her passport back. He refused to give it. She objected.

“Yes, I can. We know who you are, you are a reporter. We have your picture and you were told several times that you could not be here,” the officer said next, according to Trevisan.

“You were told several times not to be here,” she said he told her. She denied it. She quoted him as saying next: “That is what happens when there is high profile people involved.”

Officers handcuffed her and arrested her on the trespassing charge. They brought her to lock-up at police headquarters.

Here’s her description of her time in lock-up: ” I was searched and put on a cell, with a metal bed and a toilet, visible from the outside. At the other cells, women screamed and banged the walls. When I had to pee, I had to do so with male guards walking on the corridor. Although it was a female section, the security is made by men.”

Police released her hours later on a promise to appear in court, this coming Friday.

Yale police denied doing anything wrong. They said the reporter was repeatedly informed she could not attend the event.

Yale said in a statement this weekend that it plans to ask the state to drop the charges.

Here’s the statement the school released:

“Before she came to the Yale campus on September 26 to attempt to interview Justice Barbosa, Ms Claudia Trevisan was told that the Global Constitutionalism Seminar attended by Justice Barbosa was a private event closed to the public and the media, and that she was not permitted on Yale property.

“She came onto Yale property, entered the law school without permission, and proceeded to enter another building where the attendees of the seminar were meeting. When asked why she was in the building, she stated that she was looking for a friend she was supposed to meet. She was arrested for trespassing. The police followed normal procedures and Ms Trevisan was not mistreated in any way.

“Although the arrest for trespass was justified, the university does not plan to pursue the charge with the local prosecutor. The law school and Yale University accommodate hundreds of journalists in the course of a year at public campus events and for interviews with members of the Yale community and visitors. As with all journalists, Ms Trevisan is welcome to attend any public event at Yale and speak with anyone who wishes to grant her an interview.”

The Guardian newspaper of London reported that Trevisan came to the U.S. after years reporting in China. It quoted Trevisan as saying: “I was in China for five years and never in China did something like this happen to me.”