Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

4 Ohio ‘Blood Bucket’ Protest Students Face Trial

Four students arrested for disrupting an Ohio University student senate meeting rejected a plea bargain and maintained their pleas of “not guilty.”

The students — Jonah Yulish, Maxwell Peltz, Rebecca Sebo and Gabriel Sirkin — appeared in Athens County Municipal Court on Wednesday for a pretrial hearing, according to The Post, OU’s student newspaper.

The students had been arrested on September 10th for staging a protest of senate president Megan Marzec’s “blood bucket challenge” video calling for the university to divest from companies doing business in Israel. Their protest ended when the Ohio University Police Department arrested the students.

Marzec was in attendance at the hearing, and called the vote on whether to call in campus police to arrest the protesters.

The students were offered the chance to each plead guilty to a minor misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct and pay a $100, but all refused, according to The Post. The students have been charged with disturbing a lawful meeting, a fourth-degree misdemeanor charge. If convicted, they could face a maximum penalty of 30 days in jail and a $250 fine.

The president of Hillel, the campus Jewish network, Eric Fingerhut, a former Ohio congressman has called on the university to apologize for the arrests.

The trial is scheduled to take place on February 17 and is expected to take two days.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.

Exit mobile version