DxE investigator and animal rescuer Zoe Rosenberg is on trial in Sonoma County, California. She is facing years in jail for rescuing four sick and injured chickens from Perdue’s Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse. All media requests to record the trial have been denied, but you can follow along through these Court Watch summaries, on our Perdue Rescue Trial X account, on our Instagram, and on UnchainedTV. Check back regularly for new updates. Want to take action? Sign the petition at RightToRescue.com and share the news with your friends and family.

Monday, October 20th

Court began this morning outside the presence of the jury. Deputy District Attorney Matthew Hobson presented dozens of pages of documents and a flash drive of video clips that he intends to use for cross-examining Rosenberg. The defense objected and requested time to review these documents and videos they only just received. After a short amount of time, which was not enough to review all the last-minute evidence, the defense argued against the documents (mostly social media posts and photos of Rosenberg at protests) one-by-one, arguing they were prejudicial, in some cases completely irrelevant, and cumulative as they were largely all making the same point which was already established, that Rosenberg believes strongly in animal rights. Judge Gnoss excluded some of the documents but ruled that the majority of them could be used for cross-examination. The court delayed addressing the video clips until tomorrow. At this point, the jury entered, Rosenberg took the stand again, and Hobson continued cross-examination.

He questioned Rosenberg about leading DxE's social media team, about how the footage from the rescue was uploaded and included in a livestream, and about how previous actions at Reichardt Duck Farm in 2019 and Sunrise Farms in 2018 were also livestreamed. He also asked her again about the speaking tour she did leading up to this trial and whether the tour was for publicity. She said in part, yes. Hobson continued asking questions about publicity, including about a Facebook event page promoting the Animal Liberation Conference, about how the Sunrise Farms and Reichardt Duck Farm rescues happened at previous Animal Liberation Conferences, how they generated a lot of publicity, and about the near-daily videos Rosenberg is posting on social media about what's happening in this trial. He concluded this series of questions by asking, "When is your birthday?" Rosenberg answered, "June 13th."

Hobson is not done with his cross-examination of Rosenberg. It will continue tomorrow afternoon.

When Judge Gnoss dismissed the jury, he told them that he expects to finish the evidentiary portion of this case most likely by Thursday and to have closing arguments and jury instructions on Friday.