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On the evening of June 4, the Stanford Daily’s Slack channel was bursting with energy. Student journalists had just learned that the past eight months of standoffs between pro-Palestinian protesters and university administrators were coming to a head with some kind of occupation or sit-in the next morning—the last class day of the school year.
One student—freshman Dilan Gohill, nineteen—was especially engaged, according to the text threads. “Hey guys!! I heard y’all are in contact with SAAP [Students Against Apartheid in Palestine] abt a possible action tmrw—I was planning on covering tmrw morn and have been talking with them.… Is it cool if I cover?”
A bit later, Gohill added a prescient line. He said protesters would be “letting us be inside and will support us if arrested too (which i’m comfortable with too).”
Just before dawn the next morning, a dozen protesters got inside Building 10—the site of the university president’s office. They were followed by Gohill, who was wearing a press badge, a Stanford Daily sweatshirt, and a camera. A much larger crowd would later assemble outside, where someone spray-painted “DE@TH 2 ISR@HELL” and “PIGS TASTE BEST DEAD” on the sandstone walls of the Main Quad.
The protest didn’t last long. Santa Clara County sheriff’s deputies broke into the barricaded building a little after 7am and arrested everyone—including Gohill, who says (as do his colleagues and a protester) that he was there to observe and report, not to protest. Gohill then spent more than twelve hours in custody before his mother got him released on $20,000 bail. He faces allegations of burglary, vandalism, and conspiracy—all felonies. A deputy district attorney told me this week that Gohill’s case “is still under review.”
Meanwhile, Stanford officials haven’t stopped pushing for Gohill to face prosecution. Shortly after the occupation, then-president Richard Saller and provost Jenny Martinez sent out this statement: “We believe that the Daily reporter who was arrested inside the building acted in violation of the law and University policies and fully support having him be criminally prosecuted.” When asked for comment this week, university spokeswoman Luisa Rapport said “the university’s position has not changed.”
An August arraignment date passed without prosecutors filing formal charges. But the criminal case lingers, and Stanford’s hard line haunts the proceedings. “You have an institution of higher learning urging the criminal prosecution of a young person for doing their job,” said Max Szabo, an attorney and spokesman for Gohill. “He’s been in limbo for far too long.”
Gohill, who had just started doing journalism the previous October, faced a complex set of choices that morning, one that many journalists must confront. How far should a reporter or photographer go to follow a breaking story, especially if arrests are possible? How much protection do press credentials offer? As I’ve reported this story, I realize that the arrest also raises tough questions for editors. I spent most of my career directing journalists as they cover stories ranging from riots and hurricanes to corporate mergers and race relations. We editors want the story, and we want our staff to be safe.
Sometimes, as the young journalists on the Stanford quad learned that June morning, those two priorities collide.
Gohill arrived as a new student from Los Angeles in September 2023, and soon thereafter, he stopped by a Stanford Daily open house. He hadn’t worked for his high school paper, but at the Daily, “I just immediately fell in love with the idea of reporting and journalism and shedding light on things that aren’t seen,” he told me in a recent interview, his first since the arrest.
The Daily, which operates independently of the university, was riding high. Over the previous year, freshman Theo Baker spearheaded a monumental investigative series showing that Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne had overseen manipulated or sloppy work in his neurobiology research. After the Daily stories ran, Baker became the youngest-ever recipient of a Polk Award, and Tessier-Lavigne stepped down as the head of one of the world’s most prestigious universities. (Disclosure: I’m a 1977 Stanford alum who did a brief and undistinguished stint at the Daily my freshman year before joining some pals to start an alt-weekly.)
A few weeks after Gohill arrived, the Hamas-Israel war broke out. Stanford, like many other schools, was riven by vociferous protests. Gohill’s first story for the Daily ran on October 23, 2023, and was titled “Students stage sit-in to demand University action on Palestine.” He was appointed the Daily’s “student activism beat reporter” and wrote frequently as Stanford administrators struggled to balance free-speech rights with concerns about anti-Semitism and violations of university protocols. An encampment at Stanford’s centrally located White Plaza went on for almost four months until Saller and Martinez agreed not to seek legal or disciplinary action against the protesters. A similar encampment sprang up two months later.
Throughout the protests, Gohill and another Daily reporter, Greta Reich, filed regular dispatches about demonstrators on both sides of the conflict. Their stories were factual, unbiased, and filled with quotes and color that came from on-the-ground reporting. As the school year was coming to a close, Gohill won a prestigious award from the university that paid $9,600 for a summer internship at the Los Angeles Times. That was an unusual achievement for someone whose reporting career had spanned less than a year.
As tense as Stanford’s campus had been, nothing compared to the events of June 5. After getting a tip the night before, Gohill “was directed to follow the protesters inside of wherever they were occupying. But we had no idea what that would be,” recalls Emma Talley, who was a Daily executive editor at the time. “He was also directed that, if you are asked to leave, you need to leave.”
Before dawn the next morning, Gohill and Reich found the protesters in a meeting room about a half mile from the Main Quad. “We walked into this room, and there’s a hundred people there, all dressed in black,” Gohill recalls. The protesters “had masks on, sunglasses on, and they were writing phone numbers on their arms.”
The reporters accompanied the protesters as the group walked, and then sprinted, toward the quad. As they got to Building 10, “someone from inside opened the door,” Gohill said. The protesters went in, and, Gohill recalls, “I was like, ‘See ya later, Greta. I’ll go in with them.’ I walked in and immediately the door slammed shut behind me.”
Gohill remembers seeing “ladders covering the doors, bike locks, zip ties, chairs. That was already how it was when I walked in.” He says he “was trapped inside. And I had a moment where I was like, ‘Oh no, this is not good.’”
Daily staff communicated via Slack. I’ve reviewed a transcript of their conversation, which provides a compelling contemporaneous account of the events.
Just after 5:30am, Gohill texted his colleagues: “I’m inside with around 10 ppl” and added that protesters were “blockading the door with chains and zip ties.”
A colleague asked, “Out of curiosity, where is inside?”
Gohill replied, “inside building 10 presidents office.”
As he entered, he told me later, he was asked to wear a mask because a protester was immunocompromised. Within three minutes, he was sending photos of protesters blocking entryways. “Holy shir this is intense,” he texted, adding that the protesters had “covered security cameras with tin foil.” Then he texted his colleagues, “idk how imma get out lol.”
As the protesters settled in, more people joined the demonstration outside the president’s office. “Protesters are arriving, probably more like 75-100 outside now,” Reich texted as she sent photos to her editors.
Inside Building 10, Gohill was filing feeds for the Daily’s main story. But when things slowed, he decided to work on a presentation for a Writing and Rhetoric class that he assumed he’d attend later that morning.
By around 6:30am, Gohill’s editors were becoming more concerned as law enforcement arrived: “I think if you can leave you probably should,” one of them advised.
It was too late.
“Cops breaking in—protestors preparing to be arrested. I’ll say i’m a member of the press,” Gohill texted. “I can hear them trying to break in lol.… we’re in the main room now. window broken.”
Gohill sent photos of protesters with their arms up. Then tense minutes passed without a word from him. “Dilan hows it going,” asked an editor. Another texted him, “are you still inside.”
Reich responded that a colleague just let her know that Gohill had been arrested.
“She saw it on Instagram.”
Gohill and his editors thought he’d be treated with some deference. “I was told by my editors, ‘When they [deputies] walk in, step to the side and tell the police you’re press. They’ll let you go,’” he told me. “They said, ‘Once the protesters are out of the building, meet up with Greta outside and follow them in the car and take pictures.’ We never thought this would happen.”
His editors couldn’t believe it either. He recalls that one of them told him, “It’s okay, Dilan, they have the right to relocate you, they don’t have the right to arrest you.”
And the protesters didn’t understand why a reporter was being grouped with them. As the arrests ensued, they told officers, “Dilan’s not with us! Free my boy Dilan!” Gohill recalls.
It took a while for the gravity of the situation to dawn on him: “I kept looking at the clock thinking, ‘Okay, if they let me out in the next twenty minutes, I can make it to my college lecture.’” But as the hours passed, he said, “I realized, ‘Oh shit, I’m going to jail.’”
He was handcuffed and led into a sheriff’s van, then taken to a holding cell, which would fill up with about ten other inmates, most of them unrelated to the protests. Gohill, who is gay, said a jail employee pulled him aside and told him, “This is the rape hotline. If you get raped, you contact any of our officers.”
Gohill said that officers also “tried to hold my phone up and biometrically use my face ID to open my phone. And I literally turned my head and said, ‘I do not consent.’” Officials took (and haven’t yet returned) his phone, along with his laptop, school notebooks, and a camera from the Daily. He was released late that night.
Complicating matters for Daily managers is that, unbeknownst to them, one of the paper’s editors had decided to join the occupation—but as a protester, not a journalist. That student was also arrested, and resigned from the paper shortly after the protest.
But by all accounts, Gohill was there only as a journalist. One protester, who asked not to be named, wrote this to me: “I did not, nor to my knowledge did any one of the protesters, consider Dilan to be there in any capacity other than a member of press.”
University officials initially barred Gohill from campus, but they changed their mind a few days later—just for him, not the others. “We do not believe he presents an immediate threat to the health and safety of campus,” they wrote.
But that didn’t diminish the university’s zeal to see Gohill prosecuted. “It is quite clear that the Daily reporter had no First Amendment or other legal right to be barricaded inside the president’s office,” the university stated.
Gohill was allowed to resume his classes this fall, even as he is still dealing with a disciplinary process. Meanwhile, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office continues to mull whether to move forward with the case, while dozens of journalism and free-speech organizations have rallied to Gohill’s cause.
Student protesters on other campuses have faced criminal charges. At Columbia University, where I teach, the occupation of Hamilton Hall led to forty-six arrests. Manhattan prosecutors dropped the charges against almost all the defendants less than two months later.
Gohill’s case also raises the thorny issue of how reporters and their editors ought to respond when they’re about to cover news that could include arrests. Many newsrooms would abide by this advice from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press: “Journalists can be arrested if police have probable cause to believe a journalist broke a generally applicable law while reporting—for example, by trespassing.… Journalists should be cognizant of where they are at all times and try to avoid trespassing on private property.”
That said, stories take twists and turns that editors and their staffs can’t always anticipate. There’s a long history of students occupying buildings, for example, but those protests often amount to little more than nonviolent sit-ins where doors are left open and others are allowed to come and go.
And let’s be honest about how journalists get rewarded—internally and externally. When a big story is breaking, the reporters who snag the telling anecdotes and the photographers who capture the dramatic shots are the ones who will be lauded by colleagues and prize committees. More than once in my years as a city editor, I’ve asked journalists how they captured that dramatic scene, and I was told some version of, “You don’t want to know.” And even when I insisted on knowing, I must acknowledge that I might not have been told the entire story behind the story.
In the Stanford Daily’s case, we have contemporaneous evidence that Gohill entered the building as a reporter and did his job by filing photos and details from inside the building. Based on what we know now, it’s hard to see how prosecutors could make the case that he intended or conspired to occupy, vandalize, or burglarize the president’s office. Six months on, it isn’t clear why the district attorney is still reviewing the case, and it’s even less clear why Stanford has taken such an aggressive posture toward a student journalist with less than a year’s experience.
Since the arrest, the Daily’s editors have instituted additional training, and they’ve had time to ponder the disconnect between getting the story and getting arrested. Talley, the former executive editor, has had second thoughts. Taking into account Gohill’s age, she told me, “If I were in that position today, knowing what I know now, I would say, ‘Stay the hell away.’ That goes against everything I’ve been taught as a journalist—follow the story, shine a light in dark places. I don’t know that it’s worth it.”
As for Gohill, he’s still working for the Daily, but on the business side, not as a reporter. Stanford still employs him as a tour guide for high school students hoping to get admitted.
How does he feel now about his decisions on June 5? “We haven’t seen a protest like this on campus in years. The fact that our own students are getting arrested on campus—there needs to be eyes on that. And I think that me being there provided context that we wouldn’t have had if I’d stayed outside,” he told me. “While it was super traumatic, I really don’t regret doing it, because it was important that someone was there.”
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