“This is not your house. It is my house. And I want you to leave,” shouts Fisk, who threatens to call the police.
In a statement, Chemerinsky called the university’s investigation a routine response to a complaint.
“It is no more than that,” Chemerinsky said. “It is disturbing that the student who deliberately disrupted a dinner party at my home and refused to cease the disruption or leave when asked repeatedly to do so then had the audacity to file a complaint with the campus that she was mistreated.”
Afaneh is co-president of the group Law Students for Justice in Palestine, which has long demanded that UC Berkeley divest from manufacturing companies that supply weapons to Israel and called for a boycott of the dinner at Fisk and Chemerinsky’s house. After the altercation, it released a statement demanding the couple’s resignations.
Chemerinsky, who is Jewish, has said a poster that Afaneh’s group distributed, which included a caricature of him holding a bloody knife and fork and the words “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves,” was blatantly antisemitic.
UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ said in a statement last month that she was “appalled and deeply disturbed” by what happened and offered her support to Chemerinsky. “While our support for free speech is unwavering, we cannot condone using a social occasion at a person’s private residence as a platform for protest,” Christ said.
The San Francisco Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, praised the university’s Title IX investigation.
“It is crucial that all students, regardless of their religious or political beliefs, are safe and respected at university-sanctioned events,” Zahra Billoo, the group’s executive director, said in a statement on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian student protests continue at UC Berkeley, with 170 tents at the steps of Sproul Hall as of last Friday, according to local news site Berkeleyside. There were at least 14 pro-Palestinian encampments on college campuses in California as of last week.
