Deerbrook testified that she placed the GPS trackers, used bolt cutters to get through a fence and brought the buckets used to transport the chickens. She pleaded no contest to two misdemeanor charges in June.
But prosecutors have pointed to a long history of similar activism by Rosenberg. Deputy District Attorney Matt Hobson showed the jury photos of her pouring fake blood on the floor of a Safeway and posing in red-hued water in a fountain at UC Berkeley, holding a sign that said “UC Berkeley drop factory farms,” the Press Democrat reported.
Rosenberg was also previously arrested following a 2022 NBA playoff game, where she chained herself to a basketball hoop in protest of former Minnesota Timberwolves’ owner Glen Taylor. Direct Action Everywhere claimed responsibility for that protest as part of ongoing efforts to get Taylor to step down over his financial backing of an Iowa-based egg farm they say participated in animal cruelty.
“The ongoing prosecution is not about silencing speech — it is about holding accountable a pattern of calculated, unlawful activity,” a Petaluma Poultry spokesperson said in a statement.
In two recent criminal cases, juries agreed with attorneys’ arguments that activists were making “open rescues,” saving animals from suffering. Wayne Hsiung, DxE co-founder, was acquitted in a case involving the removal of two piglets from a Utah farm, and activists in Merced County were found not guilty after taking two chickens from a Foster Farms truck.
Whether this will work in Rosenberg’s case remains to be seen. Hsiung was sentenced to probation and 90 days in Sonoma County Jail in 2023 for felony conspiracy related to farm protests in Sonoma County in 2018 and 2019.
Rhode Island Red chickens at Weber Family Farms in Petaluma on Oct. 28, 2024. (Gina Castro/KQED)
Farmers in Sonoma County have called Direct Action Everywhere “extremist” and alleged that their actions go beyond animal welfare.
“While we welcome open and honest discussion about the welfare of animals, we strongly oppose the extreme tactics used by [Direct Action Everywhere],” said Julie Katigan, the Chief Human Resources Officer at Petaluma Poultry’s corporate owner, Perdue Farms. “These are not the actions of an organization seeking constructive dialogue.”
Rosenberg has stood behind her actions, though, telling KQED in September that “there’s nothing that they [prosecutors or Petaluma Poultry] have done to me or could possibly do to me that would ever compare to the level of suffering that animals endure every second of their lives.”
When asked on the stand if she wants open rescue “to be something that happens everywhere,” she told prosecutors: “Yes.”
KQED’s Dana Cronin contributed to this report.