The rubber corpse on the regent’s lawn was made of latex, not flesh. The blood was paint. The message written across the chest was a demand: divest. The prosecutor calls it intimidation. The hand that unsealed the indictment holds the pen that wrote the words conspiracy to terrorize. The pen has not been washed since the press conference. There is a metallic taste under the prosecutor’s tongue when he says the word justice.
I am Mary Magdalena, and I indict you, Jerome Gorgon Jr., for trying to silence campus dissent with a federal stamp. The docket opens on a Wednesday morning. The charges are unsealed. The cuffs are fastened. You call it the rule of law. The law is a hammer you swing at children asking where their tuition buys rifles. The gavel falls. The boys are in the van.
On Wednesday, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment against eight pro-Palestinian activists, charging them with conspiring to run a criminal intimidation campaign against University of Michigan officials. The charging document describes several incidents: fake bloody corpses placed on the lawn of an elected university board member; spray-painted anti-Israel messages at the home of then-president Santa Ono; and red inverted triangles and handprints—symbols the indictment itself labels “threatening symbols used by Hamas.” You stood at the microphone and declared, “In America, we rule by law not by fear. These alleged threats and attempts to terrorize government officials, businesses, and the Jewish Federation are anti-American. We will counter intimidation with justice.” Six faced you in Detroit on Wednesday. One you pulled from Wisconsin. Another is still at large, the word fugitive hung around her name. The Associated Press could not reach the defendants or their counsel for comment.
The university has insisted it has no direct investments in Israel and less than $18 million in funds that might include Israeli-tied companies. The same institution, a Guardian investigation found, hired private investigators to surveil students involved in campus protests. The university already apologized for punishing a professor who praised the protesters. Now it will accept the federal indictment of its own students as the proper working of the law. Most charges against the student protesters nationwide were filed at the state and local level, and most were ultimately dropped; a federal conspiracy indictment of this kind is an escalation, not a routine filing.
Strip the docket formatting and the posture cracks. Jerome, the eight are not terrorists. A latex corpse is not a corpse. A red triangle on a wall is not a bullet. You know this. You have been a prosecutor long enough to know the difference between a threat and a message. You stood at the lectern and said anti-American. Your throat produced the word intimidation, and your throat knows it is the wrong word. The word you meant was silence. You cannot swallow the word you meant. It sits in your esophagus like a shard of glass from a broken window at the Jewish Federation building—the window that was already broken, the window you are now using to frame the eight.
Your diaphragm does not drop when you read the conspiracy charge. The morning briefing arrives on your desk. The coffee sits hot on the wood. You read the word conspiracy. You sign the authorization. Your throat accepts the morning swallow without catching, without tasting the salt of the people you are putting in the federal system for asking where the university’s money goes. The people are named on the paper. They are not a conspiracy. They are twenty-one and twenty-two and twenty-eight. They are asking why the ledger funds Boeing and Lockheed Martin while they sit on the grass. I see the ledger. I see the paint on the pavement. They put a fake corpse on the grass because the real corpses are in the rubble in Gaza and the news cycle has moved on. They spray the paint because the administration has called the National Guard on their friends before. You call it intimidation. The noise students make when the adults lock the doors is called intimidation by the man who turned the key.
Jerome, your stomach does not contract when you read the charge sheet. The morning yogurt does not turn. You do not feel the hollow where the young activist’s stomach turns. What if it were your granddaughter on the grass? What if she were the one with the spray paint in her coat pocket and the indictment in her mailbox? Would the rule of law protect her? Would your law stop the handcuffs from closing on the wrists she uses to write her essays? You know the answer. The law protects the administration. The law protects the endowment. The law protects the men who sit on the board and drink from the clean cups.
You raise your hand to press the microphone and say “we rule by law.” The same hand that signs the paper that sends them to court. The same hand that waves at the cameras when the press pool nods. The same hand that will lift the coffee cup tomorrow morning. The coffee will taste of the metal you cannot name. You will think it is the coffee. The law is not a shield for the powerless. The law is the lever you pull when the students stop being quiet. You are a small man in a large building, Jerome. You wear the suit. You hold the title. You are not a general. You are a clerk who has been given a stamp and told to use it.
The suspects will sit in a courtroom. They will wait for a judge to decide if their paint is a threat. They will pay attorneys they cannot afford. Their transcripts will carry the mark. Their mothers will pace the kitchen floor. Your kitchen is quiet. Your wife sleeps. Your coffee is poured. The stamp hits the page. They are gone. The board members whose lawns were decorated with paint-blood will testify about their fear. They will describe the feeling of waking to a latex body on the grass. They will not describe the feeling of a child in Gaza waking to a real body in the rubble, because that is not in the indictment. The indictment is a document that has been cleansed of all context. It is a glass of water from a poisoned well, and you, Jerome, are holding it up to the light and calling it clarity.
The taste under your tongue will not leave. It will be there when you go to bed tonight. It will be there when you kiss your wife goodnight. It will be there when you wake and brush your teeth. The taste is the residue of the word justice after it has been chewed by the machinery of power and spat back out. The word no longer means what it meant. The word now means: we will make you stop. “Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers.” You have laid the burden on the eight. You do not carry it. You go home to a warm room.
There is a scripture for men who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. It is a woe that hangs in the air of the courtroom where the eight will stand before the judge. “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.” The indictment is bitter. The hand that signed it is bitter. The taste under the tongue is the taste of the prophet’s woe. It will not be rinsed out. It will not be forgiven. It will remain until the indictment is withdrawn and the eight are free, and then it will remain a little longer, because a woe that is spoken over a man who dressed cruelty as principle does not depart when the cruelty is undone. It departs when the man can no longer swallow the word justice without tasting his own hand.
I write with Magdalene’s indignation. The law is yours to swing. The truth is mine to carry.