NEW YORK, NY.- Two people have been charged with hate crimes, accused of being part of a group of vandals in June who smeared red paint and graffiti at the homes of the Jewish director of the Brooklyn Museum and other leaders of the institution.

Samuel Seligson, 32, of Brooklyn, a journalist, was charged Tuesday with two counts of criminal mischief as hate crimes. His arrest came a week after the police arrested Taylor Pelton, 32, of Queens, who was charged with several counts of criminal mischief in the third degree as hate crimes.

The police said vandals attacked the Brooklyn Heights home of Anne Pasternak, director of the museum, by smearing red paint and graffiti across the entry of her apartment building and hanging a banner that accused her of being a “white-supremacist Zionist.”

The homes of two trustees and the museum’s president and chief operating officer, Kimberly Panicek Trueblood, were also targeted, Taylor Maatman, a museum spokesperson, said at the time.

The attacks occurred a week after the police arrested dozens of activists outside the museum, including a leader of the pro-Palestinian group Within Our Lifetime, after a protest in which some people invaded the museum.

Pelton, who was also charged in Manhattan Criminal Court, is accused of driving Seligson and four other people who have not been apprehended.

Seligson’s lawyer, Leena Widdi, said he is a videographer whose work has appeared in Reuters, Al Jazeera, ABC and Fox News. “Mr. Seligson is being charged for alleged behavior that is protected by the First Amendment and consistent with his job as a credentialed member of the press,” she said. “Nothing in the complaint against Mr. Seligson alleges anything more than behavior consistent with his role as a journalist.”

Pelton’s lawyer, Moira Meltzer-Cohen, declined to comment on her client’s case. However, speaking in general, Meltzer-Cohen said that hate crimes legislation “like all law,” can be used to “benefit the powerful party at the expense of the more vulnerable party.”

“Nobody here was targeted as a result of their membership in a protected class,” Meltzer-Cohen said. “But the claim that they were is being used to undermine the validity of their political speech.”

Community organizers have staged protests at the Brooklyn Museum throughout Pasternak’s tenure, which began in 2015. During the Israel-Hamas war, the museum has become a target for pro-Palestinian activists who claim there is a link between wealthy trustees and the military-industrial complex in Israel — an accusation that museum officials have denied.

On June 12, a group of six people, dressed in black, with some wearing masks, piled into a red Honda Fit at about 2:23 a.m. in Saint Marks Avenue in Brooklyn.

The car went to several addresses around the borough, including Pasternak’s home, where security cameras showed five of the six people entering the courtyard of her six-story brick building.

The attack took 90 seconds. The vandals smeared and spattered the front door, walls, entrance columns and courtyard with pinkish-red paint and stenciled slogans on the sidewalk and hung the banner.

She drove the group around Brooklyn and then to Manhattan, where video captured the Honda pulling up near the Fifth Avenue home of Barbara Vogelstein, the chair of the board, according to the complaints and property records.

Surveillance video captured four people walking to the apartment building and spraying paint on the canopy, sidewalk, and facade of the building. Scrawled in red paint were Vogelstein’s name, “Brooklyn Museum,” and “Blood on Your Hands,” according to the complaint.

Replacing the canopy cost $10,000, according to the complaint.

When investigators searched Pelton’s Queens home, they found a backpack that contained several cans of red spray paint, according to the complaint.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.