Yiorgos Maravelias, a former Rutgers Law School student, filed an amended complaint against the public New Jersey university on Saturday, alleging that it violated his rights when campus police officers arrested him during a pro-Israel counterprotest on the Newark campus on May 2, 2024.
Filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, the complaint comes after a district judge struck the former student’s original filing for excessive length. The judge allowed him to rewrite it. The new complaint is 45 pages, about one-third of the original 137-page filing.
Maravelias, a disabled U.S. Army veteran, stated in the amended complaint that Rutgers administrators disagreed with his political views and thought that he was Jewish, which he is not.
The Rutgers staff members “conspired” to violate his free speech and free expression rights, and campus police officers removed his anti-Hamas fliers, which referred to the group, which the United States has designated as a terrorist organization since 1997, as “savages,” he alleges.
He also accused the public university of allowing anti-Israel encampment materials to remain untouched.
The veteran says that he challenged Sahar Aziz, a distinguished law professor and chancellor’s social justice scholar at Rutgers, who was ripping his fliers from a bulletin board. He alleges that the professor told him that it was against school policy to hang the fliers there, even though, he said, anti-Israel fliers remained hanging on the site.
The former student says that he and the professor went to the dean’s office together, where, he says, the dean told the professor that no such school policy exists.
Maravelias says that when he was hanging new fliers near the anti-Israel encampment, campus police officers told him that he would be arrested if he continued to hang the materials. Indeed, officers arrested him and charged him with disorderly conduct, he says.
The Newark municipal prosecutor dismissed the charges against Maravelias in 2024, but “Rutgers refused to drop the student conduct charges,” according to the complaint.
Maravelias is seeking damages and an injunction rectifying what he says are “discriminatory practices” at the university.
