Feminist author Naomi Wolf has criticized the erosion of the right to public protest in the US after she was arrested alongside “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators in New York.
Wolf was led away in handcuffs after addressing protesters outside an awards ceremony held to honor New York’s governor, at which she was a guest.
The author had disputed claims by police that a permit granted to the event — organized by the Huffington Post Web site on Tuesday night — allowed them to clear the sidewalk outside the venue in the Soho district of Manhattan.
Inside, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was being presented with the “game-changer of the year” award by the Huffington Post. A group of protesters had arrived from the Occupy Wall Street group’s camp in Zuccotti Park to demonstrate against his opposition to extending New York State’s “millionaire’s tax” and his support of the contentious process of extracting natural gas from shale, known as fracking.
Wolf, who staged an attempt in 2008 to read the US constitution using a megaphone in New York’s Union Square and discovered it was illegal, emerged from the event to lend her support and advice to the demonstrators.
She told the Guardian on Wednesday: “When I came out, the protesters had been pushed across the street. This happens in Britain too, with kettling. Police keep inventing this right to barricade people in and tell people where to protest, but in the United States this is wrong — it’s against the first amendment rights of freedom of assembly.”
“So I walked over to where they were — they were backed up against the wall. Police said there was a permit saying they couldn’t walk on the sidewalk. There was this giant phalanx of police,” she said.
After discussing the issue with officers, Wolf said she established that the event’s permit did not prevent people from walking on the sidewalk outside the venue. Along with a small number of other protesters, she started to pace up and down the sidewalk.
“Then, a huge group of men in white shirts, who seem to be affiliated to the New York Police Department, but who are not self-evidently so — bigger and fitter than the rank-and-file blue-shirted officers — came in droves. About 30 or 40 of these men appeared,” she said. “They got a megaphone — which the protesters are told is illegal — and they started shouting that we were illegally disrupting an event and we should disperse.”
Wolf said she “calmly” disputed the order with one of the officers in white shirts, who are more senior than those in blue shirts.
“By this time, I was surrounded by them. One of them asked me if I was going to get out of his way. I didn’t think consciously that I couldn’t step away, but I froze. My conscience froze me,” she said.
Officers then arrested Wolf and took her to a precinct where she was issued with a summons for “refusing a lawful order.”
Wolf said she spent about half an hour in a cell. Her partner, the film producer Avram Ludwig, was also arrested.
Wolf, who held the 2008 event while researching her book Give Me Liberty, said there was an “array of anti-dissent permits and restrictions” in New York, preventing the use of megaphones and restricting the right of assembly.
“It’s a completely opaque process. If your permit is refused, you can’t find out who refused it and why. It’s completely Stalinist,” she said.
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