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A 23-year-old woman was charged today with a bias crime for forcibly removing a Portland State University student's hijab and attempting to choke her with it, Multnomah County Circuit Court records say.
Jasmine Campbell, 23, allegedly approached a Muslim woman from behind at a MAX station on Southwest Yamhill Street Nov. 12 and attempted to choke her with her hijab before removing it and rubbing it "across multiple exposed sexually intimate parts of her body," court records say.
The Multnomah County District Attorney's Office today filed a bias crime indictment against Campbell for the November incident.
Campbell does not know the victim, court records say. Booking documents for an unrelated trespassing arrest in December describe her as "transient" or living at various addresses in Southeast Portland.
The alleged victim, 24, is an international student from Saudi Arabia. She said she no longer feels safe wearing her hijab in public, court records say, and now wears a knit cap and scarf to cover herself.
"The fact that she's no longer wearing a hijab shows the level of traumatization," said Zakir Khan, who runs the Oregon chapter of the Center for American Islamic Relations.
Khan drew comparisons to the 2017 MAX train attack in which Jeremy Christian stabbed three men, two of whom died, after verbally abusing two teenage girls of color, one of them wearing a hijab.
"We're right back where we started from in terms of hate," Khan said.
Campbell was charged with two counts of bias crime, one count of attempted strangulation, one count of harassment and one count of criminal mischief.
Campbell failed to appear in court Friday morning, the district attorney said in a press release. The warrant for her arrest remains active.