Zoe Edelman and her co-conspirators carried out a ‘calculated plan of destruction,’ DA’s office says
The granddaughter of Hillary Clinton’s mentor was officially charged with felony vandalism and trespassing after she “ransacked” the Stanford University president’s office as part of an anti-Israel demonstration last year.
Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen on Thursday announced the charges against Zoe Edelman, the granddaughter of Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, whom Hillary Clinton has called her “hero and mentor.” Eleven other suspects were also charged in the case.
Edelman was arrested after the office takeover last June, but the case has been in limbo for months while prosecutors decided whether to bring forth charges. Felony vandalism and conspiracy to trespass both carry potential jail sentences in California.
In its announcement, the DA’s office said Edelman and her co-conspirators carried out a “calculated plan of destruction” at Stanford that resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to campus buildings.
“Dissent is American. Vandalism is criminal,” said Rosen. “There is a bright line between making a point and committing a crime. These defendants crossed the line into criminality when they broke into those offices, barricaded themselves inside, and started a calculated plan of destruction.”
Edelman, a senior at Stanford and member of the anti-Israel group “Liberate Stanford,” has an elite left-wing pedigree. Photos show the Stanford student posing with Hillary Clinton at a gala in Washington, D.C., in 2022.
Edelman’s father, Josh, was the longtime K-12 deputy director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Her grandfather served in the Department of Health and Human Services under President Bill Clinton.
Edelman’s grandmother, Marian Wright Edelman, oversaw Hillary Clinton’s internship at the Children’s Defense Fund while Clinton was studying at Yale Law School.
“Adults can have mentors, too. I had one after I met Marian Wright Edelman during my first year of Yale Law School,” Clinton wrote in The Person Who Changed My Life, a book on mentorship edited by Matilda Cuomo. “Marian, a civil rights lawyer and children’s advocate, inspired my own commitment to justice.”
In a statement last week, the DA’s office said the activists carefully plotted the building takeover.
The anti-Israel demonstrators, wielding “hammers, crowbars, [and] chisels,” allegedly broke into the president’s office building around 5:30 a.m., where they “broke windows and furniture, splashed fake blood, and disabled security cameras.” After barricading themselves inside the building, they “began recording social media videos that listed a series of demands.”
The DA’s office said it recovered cell phones from the suspects which showed they “met on multiple occasions, days in advance, to conspire to take over the building” and traded “encrypted text messages and links to detailed operational plans.”
These messages included a “DO-IT-YOURSELF OCCUPATION GUIDE,” which advocated for vandalism.
“Occupying a space removes the space from the capitalist landscape,” said the guide, which has been circulated by pro-Hamas campus organizers. “A group may decide it is better to destroy or vandalize a space than to return it to its usual role in good condition.”
Edelman’s arraignment is scheduled for later this month, according to the DA’s office.
