Journalist briefly detained while covering pro-Palestinian protest on Wall Street

Freelance journalist Talia Ben-Ora was briefly detained and handcuffed while reporting on a pro-Palestinian demonstration outside the New York Stock Exchange in New York City on Oct. 14, 2024.

Ben-Ora told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that the group Jewish Voice for Peace had organized a sit-in before the exchange’s opening bell that day, with demonstrators wearing shirts and carrying banners opposing the U.S. arming of Israel.

“At one point a group of people just kind of rushed into this weird, gated area that’s still on the street outside the New York Stock Exchange but for some reason is fenced off,” she said. “They ran in there and so I followed after them and was documenting — as were two or three other photographers.”

She said that in addition to filming the crowd, she also captured footage of New York City Police Department officers speaking in a group nearby, noting that she was always around 15 feet away from them.

A pair of officers approached her soon after, she said, and one of them, a community affairs officer, asked if she could “go the other way.” When she expressed confusion and said that she was working, he threatened to charge her with trespassing, which she said she brushed off.

“That’s not a real thing to ask someone. And I was just like, ‘No, leave me alone. I’m working, I have my press credentials displayed, I have my professional camera out, I’m shooting footage,” Ben-Ora said. “I have already been derailed from doing my reporting by having that threat issued.”

She told the Tracker that the pair of officers walked away, but 10 minutes later she was filming the arrival of an NYPD special operations team when she saw a supervisory officer point at her.

In Ben-Ora’s footage, the officer points directly at her and can be heard saying, in part, “right here filming, get her back.” She identified the officer as John D’Adamo, who is the deputy chief commanding officer of the department’s Strategic Response Group, a heavily armored unit used for crowd control.

“I have a feeling I’m about to get arrested just for filming, but that seems absurd,” she told the Tracker. “So I start to back up and pan across the crowd a little bit like, ‘OK, well, this is going to be my last shot maybe.’ And then I move toward the fence and I hand my phone and camera to a random person.”

Ben-Ora told the Tracker her main concern was the security of her SD cards and the photos, videos and other data contained on her cellphone, and that she instructed the person to bring her belongings to a specific photographer covering the demonstration.

When she turned around, she said officers were coming toward her so she walked toward them and then they grabbed her arms and put them behind her back, placing her in flex cuffs as the crowd is heard chanting “Hands off press!”

She said she asked the officers why she was being detained, but they didn’t seem to know.

“Then a white shirt comes over as I’m saying this and he says, ‘Well, you didn’t leave when you were told. You were told to leave,’” Ben-Ora said, recounting the arrival of another supervisory officer. “And I was like, ‘No I wasn’t.’ And then I told him verbatim what I was told. And he just goes, ‘All right.’”

Moments later an officer told her that they were going to let her go after escorting her out of the gated area, and she was released to much fanfare from the crowd. She said that she was only detained for a minute or two.

“Why did they detain me? Why did they do all of this? If they just wanted me to leave, they could have just said that,” she said.

Ben-Ora told the Tracker that after removing the flex cuffs, officers asked her for her ID and photographed it, along with her press credentials. When she asked if she was being issued a citation, she was told the photographs were just “for our records.” She said the officers didn’t elaborate on what those records were.

The New York City Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.