Wayne Hsiung
Wayne Hsiung is an attorney and animal rights activist. Hsiung co-founded Direct Action Everywhere and The Simple Heart Initiative. Hsiung had been a lawyer with a prominent law firm and was a visiting assistant professor at the Northwestern University School of Law, and a National Science Foundation-funded graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hsiung was incarcerated in November 2023 after being convicted of felony trespassing for his role in an open rescue of sick and dying chickens from a factory farm in California in 2018. Hsiung has faced charges of up to 60 years in prison. In the most serious case, Hsiung was offered a deal that involved no prison time, on the condition that he not criticize the company he had investigated. He refused the offer and was acquitted after trial in 2022.
