Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen arrested during DC Julian Assange prosecution protest

Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s, was taken into custody on Thursday in Washington, DC, during a demonstration supporting Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and publisher.

Alongside the feminist advocacy group CODEPINK, Cohen — of the well-known Vermont ice cream company — condemned the U.S. government’s prosecution of Assange as an assault on press freedom, staging the protest near the Department of Justice.

Cohen was arrested together with CODEPINK co-founder Jodie Evans for blocking the entrance to the Department of Justice (DOJ) building. The pair planted themselves in front of the walkway, holding up access for roughly an hour despite a heavy downpour. The scene was captured on camera.

To open the protest, Cohen set a “Freedom of the Press” sign alight and declared, “Freedom of the press is going up in smoke.”

“There’s no democracy without freedom of the press because the press is the only thing that can hold government accountable. And there’s no freedom of the press as long as Assange is being prosecuted,” Cohen said.

At the time of the protest, Assange, then 52, was being held at Belmarsh Prison, a maximum-security facility in southeast London, while fighting extradition to the United States to face charges under the Espionage Act.

“It’s outrageous. Julian Assange is nonviolent. He is presumed innocent, and yet somehow or other, he has been imprisoned in solitary confinement for four years. That is torture,” Cohen said. “He revealed the truth, and for that, he is suffering and we need to do whatever we can to help him.”

The WikiLeaks founder faced 18 counts tied to the publication of classified files about the Iraq War and Guantanamo Bay between 2010 and 2011. If convicted on all counts, he faced a maximum of up to 175 years in prison.

Numerous journalists have condemned the case against Assange as an attack on a free and open press.

Long known as an activist and outspoken about his progressive views, Cohen arrived in Washington, D.C., seemingly prepared to be arrested.

“If you’re trying to fight an issue of injustice, you can scream and yell, you can write, but the ultimate thing you can do is get arrested for it, to disobey the unjust law. So that’s what I’m doing and I feel good about it,” Cohen told a reporter while seated in the walkway leading to the DOJ entrance.

After roughly three hours in custody, Cohen said in a post on X that he and Evans had been released by police.

Days earlier, on Independence Day, Ben & Jerry’s had drawn attention with a statement that the United States was founded on stolen Indigenous land that should be returned — a post that generated heated debate, with some applauding the stance and others calling for a boycott.

Update: Assange Freed in 2024 Plea Deal

Much has changed since this 2023 protest. On June 24, 2024, Julian Assange was released from Belmarsh Prison after reaching a plea agreement with U.S. prosecutors, bringing his long extradition fight to a close. He pleaded guilty to a single felony count under the Espionage Act — conspiring to obtain and disclose classified national defense documents — at a hearing in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, on June 26, 2024. The presiding judge sentenced him to time already served (the roughly five years he spent in Belmarsh), allowing him to walk free and return to his home country of Australia. In his first public remarks afterward, Assange told the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe that he had “pled guilty to journalism,” choosing freedom over a continued legal battle. Press-freedom organizations welcomed his release while warning that the deal set a troubling precedent for journalists.

Cohen’s Activism Continues: Arrested Again Over Gaza

Cohen’s willingness to put his body on the line did not end with the Assange campaign. On May 14, 2025, the 74-year-old co-founder was arrested again at the U.S. Capitol — one of seven protesters forcibly removed from a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified. Rising to his feet, Cohen denounced U.S. complicity in Israel’s war on Gaza, shouting that Congress “pays for bombs that kill children in Gaza” and pairing that charge with the Republican push to cut Medicaid at home: “Congress kills poor kids in Gaza by buying bombs, and pays for it by kicking kids off Medicaid in the U.S.”

Capitol Police zip-tied his hands behind his back and walked him out, charging him with the misdemeanor offense of crowding, obstructing, and incommoding. As he was led away, Cohen pressed the point that mattered most to him: “Congress and the senators need to ease the siege. They need to let food into Gaza. They need to let food to starving kids.” His protest came as humanitarian organizations warned of famine across Gaza, where Israel’s prolonged obstruction of aid had pushed the territory’s population toward mass starvation under a bombardment that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them children. A CODEPINK spokesperson framed it bluntly, saying Americans were expected to look away while Israel was “literally starving them to death.”

The stance was consistent with the company’s record: Ben & Jerry’s announced in 2021 that it would stop selling its ice cream in the occupied Palestinian territory, calling continued sales there inconsistent with its values, and Cohen has since become one of the more prominent corporate voices condemning Israel’s conduct and Washington’s military support for it. For more on the deadly toll of the aid crisis Cohen was protesting, see our report on how more than 30 Palestinians were killed and 200 injured by Israeli gunfire near a U.S. food aid site in Gaza.

Watch Cohen discuss his Capitol arrest below: