Helyeh Doutaghi, deputy director of Yale Law School’s Law and Political Economy Project, placed on “immediate administrative leave” as university investigates allegations
A research scholar at Yale Law School also moonlights as a member of a U.S.-sanctioned terrorist fundraising entity, according to web postings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
Those postings reveal that Helyeh Doutaghi, the deputy director of Yale Law School’s Law and Political Economy Project, is a member of Samidoun, an organization sanctioned by the U.S. government in October in an announcement that described it as a “sham charity” and a “front organization” for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a foreign-designated terrorist organization.
Samidoun’s website indicates that Doutaghi, whom it describes as “a doctoral student of international law and a member of the international Samidoun Network,” delivered a speech in Iran at a Samidoun-sponsored screening of the film Fedayin: Georges Abdallah’s Fight. Abdallah, the founder of the Lebanese Armed Military Forces, was sentenced by a French court to life in prison in 1987, convicted of complicity in the 1982 murders of U.S. military attaché Charles Ray and Israeli diplomat Yacov Barsimantov, as well as involvement in the attempted 1984 assassination of the then-American consul general in Strasbourg, Robert Homme.
The relationship between Doutaghi and Samidoun was first reported by the Substack Jewish Onliner and the Buckley Beacon.
Reached for comment, a spokesman for Yale Law School told the Free Beacon that the law school takes the allegations “extremely seriously” and that Doutaghi has been placed on administrative leave.
“We take these allegations extremely seriously and immediately opened an investigation into the matter to ascertain the facts,” the spokesman, Alden Ferro, told the Free Beacon. “Helyeh Doutaghi’s short-term position as an associate research scholar with the LPE Project expires next month. Until then, she has been placed on an immediate administrative leave pending the outcome of this investigation.”
Doutaghi, according to Samidoun, also traveled with a Samidoun group on a 2023 “fact-finding mission” to Venezuela to observe the impact of “U.S. sanctions and coercive economic measures.” The mission was co-sponsored by three entities, including the International People’s Tribunal on U.S. Imperialism: Sanctions, Blockades, Coercive Economic Measures, of which Samidoun was a co-sponsor.
Doutaghi’s connection to Yale Law School is raising eyebrows on Capitol Hill and in the White House, where lawmakers and administration officials have pledged to crack down on anti-Semitism and extremism on university campuses, which receive billions of dollars in federal funding. “Schools like Yale that coddle anti-Semitic extremists in their student body or faculty should not see a dime of federal funding,” said Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), the chairman of the Republican Conference and of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services, along with the Government Services Administration, announced on Monday that they are investigation $51 billion in federal grants to Columbia University, citing the school’s “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students.” President Donald Trump, for his part, said in a social media post that “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came.”
Doutaghi, who holds an undergraduate degree from Ottawa’s Carleton University and a master’s from King’s College London and who taught at Carleton University before she arrived at Yale, according to her online biography, does not appear to be an American citizen. Yale Law School did not comment on Doutaghi’s immigration status.
Yale Law School’s Law and Political Economy Project, where Doutaghi serves as deputy director, is supported by a $600,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which says it “invests in creative thinkers and problem solvers who are working to ensure everyone has a meaningful opportunity to thrive.”
The grant to Yale Law School is intended to develop the philosophy of law and political economy as a response to neoliberalism in order to cultivate a “wide-ranging shift that will change the way law is studied and taught, the public discussion of legal and political institutions and power, and law’s role in policymaking and political mobilization,” the Hewlett Foundation says.
The Hewlett Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Doutaghi was also scheduled to speak on a panel in October alongside PFLP and Samidoun leader Khaled Barakat, who was personally sanctioned by the U.S. government in October. At the time, the Biden administration indicated that Barakat’s “fundraising and recruitment efforts support the PFLP’s terrorist activity against Israel” and that “Barakat has previously publicly acknowledged Samidoun’s affiliation with the PFLP, despite direction from PFLP leadership to maintain the confidential nature of the relationship.”
The panel was postponed indefinitely, however, due to what Samidoun described as “the recent Zionist escalation and atrocities against Iran and Lebanon, which represent an existential threat to all peoples in the region and to the planet.” The panel was to discuss how Israel “intensified the ongoing genocide by assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas,” which Samidoun described as “a blatant violation of Iranian sovereignty under international law” that “propelled the struggle for liberation in the Arab-Iranian region against Zionist-imperialist aggression into a new phase.”
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