Ben Cohen Burned a Press Sign for Julian Assange, Was Arrested Again Over Gaza, and Is Trying to Free Ben and Jerry’s From Magnum

Ben Cohen has never treated ice cream as a neutral product. In July 2023 he treated a sidewalk outside the United States Department of Justice the same way. He stood in the rain with Jodie Evans, a co-founder of CODEPINK, and helped block the entrance while he argued that prosecuting Julian Assange was a way of setting press freedom on fire. He made the metaphor literal. A sign reading freedom of the press went up in smoke in his hands. “Freedom of the press is going up in smoke,” he said. About three hours later he was back on the street, and the case he had come to shout about was still the one that could have put a publisher in prison for the rest of his life.

The protest on July 6, 2023, was built for an arrest and got one. Cohen arrived ready to be processed. He told a reporter that writing and yelling have their place, and that the last tool, when the law itself is the injury, is to disobey it and accept the handcuffs. “That’s what I’m doing and I feel good about it,” he said. He and Evans held the doorway for roughly an hour. Capitol-area policing of a federal entrance did the rest. Cohen later posted that they had been released.

Cohen was taken into custody after demonstrators obstructed an entrance at the Department of Justice. (Ben Cohen/Twitter)

The man they were there for was not a symbol Cohen had invented. Assange was in Belmarsh Prison in London, fighting extradition to the United States on Espionage Act charges tied to publishing classified material, an indictment that at its height carried the theoretical weight of 175 years. Cohen called the solitary confinement torture and the prosecution an attack on the only institution he thinks can discipline a government. “There’s no democracy without freedom of the press,” he said, “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.” He added the simpler line: Assange had revealed the truth, and he was suffering for it. The AEGIS Alliance had already followed the human cost of that confinement through the warnings from Assange’s mother about what the case was doing to him and to his children.

Cohen and Jodie Evans, co-founder of CODEPINK, protested the American case against Julian Assange. (Ben Cohen/Twitter)

Cohen called the Assange indictment a strike against journalism itself. (Ben Cohen/Twitter)

The prosecution did not survive in the form Cohen was protesting. On June 24, 2024, in a federal courtroom in Saipan, Assange pleaded guilty to a single felony count under the Espionage Act, was sentenced to time he had already served, and left for Australia. He described the deal, in the line that followed him home, as pleading guilty to journalism. Press-freedom groups welcomed the open door and hated the precedent: a publisher had still been required to call reporting a crime in order to walk. Cohen’s sidewalk fire had not forced the plea. It had kept a Vermont ice-cream founder on the record while the plea was still unimaginable to the people blocking the door.

Cohen said he and Evans were released after about three hours. (Ben Cohen/Twitter)

He used the same body, two years later, on a different indictment. On May 14, 2025, Cohen was one of the people pulled out of a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing while Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was testifying. The interruption was about Gaza and about the domestic bill Cohen believes is attached to it. As officers moved him, he said Congress “kills poor kids in Gaza by buying bombs, and pays for it by kicking kids off Medicaid in the U.S.” He told the hallway what he wanted instead: ease the siege, let food in, feed starving children. U.S. Capitol Police charged him with crowding, obstructing, or incommoding, a misdemeanor often used for this kind of protest. Six other demonstrators were arrested on more serious counts, including accusations of assaulting an officer or resisting. Cohen was released. He wrote the argument down afterward for Newsweek, and pointed people to it.

The hearing arrest only makes sense against the company’s older fight, and against what Israel has done in Gaza. In 2021 an independent board at Ben & Jerry’s said selling ice cream in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory was inconsistent with the brand’s values. The decision was not a boycott of Israel as a whole. It was a refusal to pretend settlements are an ordinary market. Unilever, the parent, answered by selling the Israeli business to a local licensee. A flavor called Milk & Honey replaced the contested pint. The board sued, settled that round, and then sued again. In November 2024 it went back to federal court and accused Unilever of blocking statements on Gaza, including support for a ceasefire and criticism of U.S. weapons. Reuters reported that the brand had described Israel’s assault as genocide, a word American consumer companies almost never use. The Guardian reported in July 2026 that the case was still moving through federal court.

The AEGIS Alliance has documented what that assault looks like when the language is stripped off the pints: catastrophic conditions that did not lift when officials announced renewed aid, and Israel’s order pushing humanitarian groups to stop work in Gaza. Cohen’s Senate line about bombs and Medicaid was a taxpayer’s version of the same ledger. A CODEPINK spokesperson, around the time of the hearing, said Americans were being asked to look away while Israel starved people. Cohen declined to look away, and he declined to let the ice-cream company he founded look away either.

The corporate answer got a new letterhead. Unilever spun the ice-cream division into The Magnum Ice Cream Company, with Peter ter Kulve as chief executive. On September 17, 2025, Jerry Greenfield quit as brand ambassador. In an open letter shared by Cohen, Greenfield said the company he co-founded had been silenced, sidelined for fear of upsetting people in power. Unilever and, later, Magnum described executive changes as spinoff housekeeping. The board described them as a muzzle. One flashpoint was a watermelon flavor meant to signal solidarity with Palestine. The board approved the idea. The parent killed it. In 2025 the company also pushed out chief executive David Stever. The board said the point was to stifle the social mission. Unilever said the role was re-evaluated because of the spinoff, that Stever was offered something inside the larger structure, and that he chose to leave.

Cohen did not quit. On September 9, 2025, he and Greenfield launched the Free Ben & Jerry’s campaign and sent letters to Magnum’s board and to investors who were about to own a slice of the spinoff. The demand is simple and expensive: sell the brand to socially aligned owners so the 2000 merger agreement’s independent board can speak again. On April 7, 2026, Cohen carried boxes of petitions to Magnum’s headquarters in Amsterdam. He was allowed into the lobby. He was not allowed to hand the boxes to a decision-maker. The campaign’s own account says the signatures, at that point more than 100,000, were turned back at the door.

At Brandweek in Atlanta he was already advertising a larger pile of names. He asked marketers to design a cheap guerrilla action, in the United States or in Amsterdam, aimed at forcing a sale. Adweek reported a petition past 200,000 names, a social audience around 800,000, a ceiling of $20,000 for the stunt, and a submission deadline of October 7, 2026. The prize he offered, if independence actually arrives, is free ice cream for life. He also said the brand’s foundation was being pushed toward closing by the end of the year because the funding had been cut. Separately, he has moved to sell a watermelon sorbet on his own, outside the company that blocked the flavor, as a personal product rather than a corporate one. Magnum, for its part, still counts Ben & Jerry’s among its top brands. The Guardian, citing company figures, noted about 3 percent organic sales growth for the brand in 2025 inside a Magnum business of roughly 7.9 billion euros, with about 35 percent of that revenue in the Americas.

Cohen’s Newsweek piece after the Capitol arrest argued that he could not call himself an American and keep his body out of it. That sentence runs from the burned sign to the zip ties to the Amsterdam lobby. He thinks citizenship includes getting arrested when the law, or the budget, is the weapon. He also thinks a brand that spent decades advertising its conscience cannot be told to sell Cherry Garcia and stay quiet about children under bombardment. Magnum can refuse the meeting. It cannot honestly claim the founder never showed up.

Readers who want the longer record of the protest, the war, and the companies around both can start with activism coverage from The AEGIS Alliance and with the killing of dreams, and of a goalkeeper, inside Israel’s genocide in Gaza.