An Ohio State University professor has been placed on administrative leave pending a campus police investigation into an allegation of assault on an independent journalist.
Video published Tuesday by a local newsletter writer shows Luke Perez, an assistant professor who studies the ethics of war and international religious freedom, in a hallway while a local journalist and filmmaker, whom local news outlets identified as Mike Newman, holds up a camera and a smartphone.
Shortly after the video starts, Newman steps forward and Perez steps in his way. Perez then suddenly knocks the phone out of Newman’s hands and grabs at him. Perez appears to put one of his arms around Newman’s head, knocking Newman to the ground.
“I told you not to put that into my face,” Perez tells Newman as he stands over him on the ground. Perez then shouts that Newman assaulted him, though the video doesn’t show that. Newman didn’t respond to a LinkedIn message, and NBC News was unable to find a working phone number for him.
Perez directed a request for comment to the university’s media relations office.
“We are aware of the incident, and it is very concerning,” Benjamin Johnson, an Ohio State spokesman, said in a statement. Perez has been placed on administrative leave pending a university police investigation.
The incident is an unusual confrontation on a college campus that both conservative and liberal critics online said called into question the university’s commitment to free speech, given that the faculty members present are all affiliated with a new academic center focused on “free, open, and rigorous intellectual inquiry.” Faculty members have criticized the center because legislators who created it said they wanted to combat “leftist ideology” on campus.
The writer who posted the video, DJ Byrnes, explained in his newsletter The Rooster that he and Newman had been trying to ask questions of E. Gordon Gee, the former Ohio State president, in the hallway of a campus building Monday. He included an additional video showing Gee answering several of his questions about Richard Strauss, a former university physician who is accused of sexual abuse by over 200 former Ohio State wrestlers in the 1990s when Gee was president.
According to Byrnes, Newman wanted to ask Gee questions about Ohio State graduates with student loan debt.
Perez is affiliated with Ohio State’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture and Society, which the Legislature created last year to foster intellectual diversity. Byrnes, a self-described Ohio political gadfly, said they didn’t know who Perez was before that encounter.
Gee, the former chief executive of Brown University, Vanderbilt University and West Virginia University, is a consultant for the Chase Center. He recently said calls to remove Ohio billionaire Les Wexner’s name from campus buildings — over Wexner’s yearslong association with Jeffrey Epstein — are “cancel culture gone wild.”
Byrnes included additional videos in which he tried to continue questioning Gee in an elevator, but another professor, Christopher Green, tried to block him while shouting “you are assaulting me.” Green didn’t respond to an email and phone calls Wednesday.
Byrnes wrote that he and Newman, whom he referred to by a pseudonym, filed a report with the university’s Public Safety Department. The campus police agency hasn’t yet released a copy.
