Two Columbia University custodians, who filed complaints against the school over their chilling experiences of being trapped by an anti-Israel mob and forced to scrub swastikas, have decided to settle with the Ivy League, The Post has learned.
Lester Wilson and Mario Torres, whose complaints sparked a civil rights probe, have opted to take advantage of Columbia’s recently announced $220 million settlement for civil rights violations and racially discriminatory practices.
The settlement is for an undisclosed amount of money.
While that wraps up Wilson’s and Torres’ battle against Columbia, the two men are still forging ahead with their lawsuit against more than 40 protesters whom they allege held them hostage during the Hamilton Hall riot last year.
Columbia had inked the $220 million deal with the Trump administration to restore the bulk of federal funding to the elite institution.
The settlement featured $200 million for settling discrimination claims and about $20 million to employees who alleged they suffered civil rights violations.
Wilson’s and Torres’ settlement comes from the $20 million pot specifically, as they had filed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaints that sparked a civil rights probe into the school.
Neither Wilson nor Torres is Jewish, but the two men were horrified and traumatized by the storm of anti-Israel protests that ripped through campus in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
“The university set up the situation and ended up putting them into that situation, now the issue is holding accountable those who carried it out and were responsible for the takeover and the assault,” Brandeis Center president Alyza Lewin said in an interview.
The Brandeis Center and Torridon Law are working together on the ongoing lawsuit against the protesters.
Both men had worked at the school for five years and suffered injuries during the protests and riots on campus. Neither man has been able to return to work since, a source told The Post.
During the student takeover of Hamilton Hall in April of last year, Wilson and Torres were assaulted and chastised as “Jew-lovers” by some of the rioters, according to the complaints they filed last October.
“‘I’m going to get twenty guys up here to f–k you up,’” one masked rioter who had “violently” shoved Torres threatened, per his complaint.
“Mr. Torres pulled a fire extinguisher, which was within arm’s reach, off the wall to defend himself and replied, ‘I’ll be right here.’”
Torres was repeatedly bludgeoned on his back by rioters before escaping, while Wilson had gotten shoved and had furniture pushed into him on his battle to get outside, per the complaints.
Eventually, the NYPD intervened and cleared out the building, leading to over 100 arrests.
Even before their traumatizing experience at Hamilton Hall, the two custodians had been forced to deal with racist and antisemitic graffiti scrawled on campus as early as November 2023.
“Mr. Wilson recognized the swastikas as symbols of white supremacy,” his complaint alleged. “As an African-American man, he found the images deeply distressing. He reported them to his supervisors, who instructed him to erase the graffiti.
“No matter how many times Mr. Wilson removed the swastikas, individuals kept replacing them with more.”
Torres, who is Latino, counted up dozens of swastikas that he was forced to scrub and grew enraged over time as he kept seeing the hateful graffiti around Hamilton Hall.
He was particularly troubled by the fact that Columbia didn’t take aggressive action against the perpetrators, given that the school has security feeds and requires an electronic ID to get into the hall, which is nestled on the school’s Morningside Heights campus.
“They were so offensive, and Columbia’s inaction was so frustrating, that he eventually began throwing away chalk that had been left in the classrooms so vandals would not have anything to write with,” Torres’ complaint alleged.
“However, Mr. Torres was reprimanded by his supervisor for doing so.”
At one point, after Wilson reported a masked protester running through Hamilton Hall chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and scribling swastikas in the building, campus security told him that “the trespassers and vandals were exercising their First Amendment rights” and that “nothing could be done,” according to his complaint.
Former US Attorney General Bill Barr’s firm Torridon represented the two janitors in their complaint against Columbia.
The Post contacted Columbia for comment.
Additional reporting by David Propper
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