A British jury found two pro-Palestine activists guilty of criminal damage for plastering a photograph over a Picasso masterpiece and pouring paint across the floor of London's National Gallery, a stunt that cost the institution £8,000.
Jai Halai, 25, an NHS worker from north London, and Monday-Malachi Rosenfeld, 23, a politics student from Tower Hamlets, walked into Room 43 of the National Gallery just after midday on October 9, 2024, and covered the protective glass over Picasso's 1901 painting "Motherhood" with a photograph of a Gazan mother clutching her child. They then poured water-based paint across the wooden flooring and chanted "Free Palestine" as security guards pulled them away from the artwork.
Both denied the criminal damage charge. A jury at Southwark Crown Court disagreed, returning guilty verdicts after more than nine hours of deliberation. Judge David Tomlinson released the pair on bail, with sentencing set for a date to be fixed in September.
The gallery billed the total cost of the incident at £8,000. Michael Willie, the National Gallery's head of security and facilities, testified at trial that the water-based paint spread across marble skirting, a stanchion, rope barriers, and seeped into electrical sockets. Four workers were called in that evening at £120 per hour each to sand and refinish the wooden floor.
Of the £8,000 total, £271.59 went to cleaning and £250.28 covered what the gallery called "response costs", the time needed to reopen the space to the public. Willie acknowledged under questioning that there was no "obvious case of permanent damage" at the time, and that the paint "could be cleaned away enough to reopen the gallery." But he drew a clear line between routine visitor spills and what happened in Room 43.
Prosecutor Toby Manhire pressed Willie on the severity. Willie described the marble damage plainly:
"Just staining in the grains of the marble the mastic joint, we had to replace it in its entirety."
Asked whether spillages like this were normal at the gallery, Willie said they were not:
"Not like that but you do get spillages, small ones."
The defense tried to minimize the cleanup as routine maintenance dressed up as a crime. Katie McFadden, representing Halai, called the post-incident work an "aesthetic decision" to keep the National Gallery "looking fancy." Laura O'Brien, counsel for Rosenfeld, told the court that "things like that do happen in the National Gallery", suggesting the institution's high visitor volume made such incidents unremarkable.
The jury did not buy it.
Halai and Rosenfeld are both members of Youth Demand, an activist group described as an offshoot of Just Stop Oil. The organization shared footage of the National Gallery stunt on social media, video showing security guards struggling to remove the pair from the painting, and a second clip capturing the protesters shouting slogans as they were led away.
During their removal, the activists shouted that "the UK is complicit in genocide" and that "women are giving birth without any medical attention" in Palestine. They called for "a democratic revolution" and claimed that "87 per cent of the public support an arms embargo" on Israel, a figure not independently verified in court proceedings. Youth Demand's stated mission is to pressure the British government to stop all trade with Israel.
The National Gallery incident was not the group's first high-profile disruption. Youth Demand previously lined up fake body bags outside the home of David Lammy, then serving as Foreign Secretary. In April of the preceding year, the group caused what was described as millions of pounds worth of disruption across London.
The defense strategy rested on a simple premise: no permanent harm, no crime. If the paint washed off and the gallery reopened the next morning, the argument went, then the whole episode amounted to nothing more than a mess, the kind any busy public institution deals with.
But criminal damage under British law does not require permanent destruction. The gallery replaced marble joints, paid emergency workers overtime rates, and spent thousands restoring a room that two activists deliberately fouled to generate social media content for their cause. The jury weighed that against the defense's framing and found the damage real enough to convict.
The Picasso painting itself appears to have been shielded by its protective glass cover, the activists plastered their photograph over the glass, not the canvas. The flooring, marble, and fixtures bore the brunt of the paint. Still, the gallery's head of security made clear this was no routine spill. Workers do not ordinarily sand and refinish floors at £120 an hour on a weekday evening because a tourist dropped a coffee.
Halai and Rosenfeld remain free on bail. Their sentencing date will be set in September. Both had denied the charge throughout.
Free societies protect the right to protest. They do not protect the right to vandalize a public gallery, bill taxpayers for the cleanup, and call it activism.
