Columbia University has agreed to pay out an undisclosed sum of money to two janitors who were verbally harassed, physically assaulted, and held hostage during the anti-Israel protests that swept across the campus in the months after the October 7th massacre in Israel.
Lester Wilson and Mario Torres filed a civil rights complaint against the school after they were caught up in the student-led siege of Hamilton Hall — and barricaded inside the building with protesters who assaulted them, threatened them with violence, and called them “Jew lovers.”
“The university set up the situation and ended up putting them into that situation, now the issue is holding accountable those who carried it out and were responsible for the takeover and the assault,” Brandeis Center president Alyza Lewin said of their case.
Columbia janitors trapped, attacked by anti-Israel mob and forced to scrub swastikas settle with school for undisclosed amount https://t.co/qjN2XdRCJY pic.twitter.com/pEoFSoZM78
— New York Post (@nypost) July 24, 2025
Trump announced earlier in the week that Columbia University had agreed to pay a penalty to the federal government: $220 million, $20 million of which was to go “to their Jewish employees who were unlawfully targeted and harassed.”
Despite the fact that neither Wilson nor Torres is Jewish, they are expected to take their settlement from the $20 million designated to go to employees who were “unlawfully targeted” by the protests — most of whom were Jewish.
Both Wilson and Torres had been with the university for five years, and according to a report published Thursday by The New York Post, have not been able to return to work since the student takeover of Hamilton Hall. Both state that they were injured during the protests.
According to the initial complaint, Torres stated that a masked protester had approached him, saying, “I’m going to get twenty guys up here to f–k you up.”
Torres said that he had responded by grabbing a fire extinguisher, which he intended to use in self-defense if necessary, and said, “I’ll be right here.”
He said that protesters later beat him, striking his back before he was able to escape the building. Wilson, who also eventually escaped Hamilton Hall, said that he was attacked with piece of furniture.
Prior to the protests, both men reported multiple instances of graffiti — including swastikas — inside Hamilton Hall.
“Mr. Wilson recognized the swastikas as symbols of white supremacy. As an African-American man, he found the images deeply distressing. He reported them to his supervisors, who instructed him to erase the graffiti,” he alleged in the complaint. “No matter how many times Mr. Wilson removed the swastikas, individuals kept replacing them with more.”
Torres said that he eventually began to throw away chalk that he found left behind in classrooms, saying that he did not want to leave potential vandals anything to write with.
