Shellyne Rodriguez, NYC professor who held machete to Post reporter’s neck, founded violent ‘f–k cops’ group

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Senior News Editor since 2004

Shellyne Rodriguez, NYC professor who held machete to Post reporter’s neck, founded violent ‘f–k cops’ group​



By
Isabel Vincent


May 24, 2023 1:44pm
Updated









The fired Hunter College professor who held a machete to a New York Post reporter’s neck founded a group behind “f–k police” protests that trashed subway stations in a spree of anarchic vandalism.
Shellyne Rodriguez, 45, is a founder of Decolonize This Place, an anarchist group that vandalized the city’s subway in 2019 with anti-cop graffiti, and occupied the Whitney Museum of American Art for several months in 2018 and 2019.
Rodriguez was fired as an adjunct by Hunter College on Tuesday just hours after she was caught on video holding the blade to Post reporter Reuven Fenton’s neck while threatening to “chop” him up outside her Bronx apartment.
Foul-mouthed Rodriguez held the machete to Fenton’s neck and ranted: “Get the f–k away from my door or I’m going to chop you up with this machete!”

Shellyne Rodriguez holds a machete to a Post reporter's neck
Hunter College adjunct professor Shellyne Rodriguez held a machete to a Post reporter’s neck Tuesday outside her Bronx apartment door. Robert Miller
Shellyne Rodriguez
Rodriguez barged out of her apartment and accosted the veteran Post reporter seconds after he identified himself. Robert Miller Shellyne Rodriguez holds a machete to a Post reporter's neck Tuesday outside her Bronx apartment door.“Get the f–k away from my door! Get the f–k away from my door!” the professor raged before going back into her apartment.Robert Miller for the N.Y. Post
And after he left her building, she followed him and The Post’s photographer, waved the weapon and kicked Fenton in the shins.




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Only thing shocking about machete attack was a college actually firing a woke professor​






She was under investigation Tuesday night after a complaint was filed for possible assault charges, a law enforcement source told The Post.


Her astonishing attack on Fenton unfolded after footage surfaced online that showed Rodriguez unleashing a profanity-laden attack on anti-abortion students who’d set up an information table at Hunter College earlier this month.


But The Post can reveal that Rodriguez has a long history of outrageous conduct.


In 2016, she founded Decolonize This Place with New York University professor Amin Husain, artist Nitasha Dhillon and NYU PhD student Marz Saffore.


It describes itself online as a grassroots social justice organization that seeks to raise awareness of the struggles of Native and African Americans, Palestinians and other marginalized groups.


But in 2019, Decolonize This Place urged its radical followers to “f–k s–t up” in a violent assault on the city’s transit system that concluded with $100,000 in damage and 13 arrests.

Decolonize This Place social media
This was how Decolonize This Place asked for people to join its day of violence and vandalism. Twitter/ @decolonize_this
Trashed subway station at 72nd Street B/C stop on the Upper West Side.
Rodriguez founded the group that trashed subway stations including the 72nd Street B/C stop on the Upper West Side.
“We encourage you to link up with your friends, your family and think of the ways you can move in affinity to f–k s–t up on J-31 all day long,” a masked man said in a video posted to the Twitter page of Decolonize This Place.


The agitators held emergency gates open with bike locks, zip-ties and violin strings and rendered turnstiles useless with glue and spray paint.


They sprayed buses, stations on the A, B and C lines from the Upper West Side to Washington Heights, as well as at Borough Hall in Brooklyn, and trains with ““F–k cops, f–k MTA,” “Free transit” and other anti-cop, anti-MTA messages.


And they targeted rush hour at Grand Central, surrounding the ticket booth to try to stop sales, waving placards saying “From the A to the Z, public transit should be free.”

Vandalism at 72nd St B/C
The anti-cop group’s violent spree in January 2019 included graffiti, as well as putting glue on MetroCard readers and holding emergency doors open with violin strings and bike locks.
Grand Central protest January 2019
On top of the subway, Rodriguez’s group targeted rush hour at Grand Central.M Stan Reaves/Shutterstock
The goals of the group included “no cops in the MTA, free transit [and] no harassment.”


Police busted 13 people, including nine men and four women, in the protests — some for violent offenses, one against a cop, while a 20-year-old man from LA, Jasper Skelton, allegedly pointed a laser pointer into an officer’s eye.


It is not known if Rodriguez participated in the day of vandalism. She was not arrested, according to public records.


Then Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was “repulsed” by the hooliganism.


Around the same time as the subway protests, one of Decolonize This Place’s first acts was to target the then-vice chairman of the Whitney, Warren Kanders, by posting his address on social media and holding protests outside his Manhattan home.


The group was angered at his role as head of Safariland, a company that manufactures military and law enforcement equipment.

Whitney protest
Rodriguez was one of the leaders of protests at the Whitney, where she accused its vice chairman of “genocide.”Corbis via Getty Images
Shellyne Rodriguez
Rodriguez calls herself a “Black Marxist” and was fired by Hunter College after putting a machete to a Post reporter’s neck.Rutgers University
Rodriguez often led the anti-Kanders protests, shouting “Warren Kanders, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” a witness to the demonstrations told The Post Tuesday.


“You will not rest easy … because everybody knows now where you live,” she continued.


Kanders, an art collector and philanthropist who had been on the museum’s board since 2006, resigned in July 2019.


Shellyne Rodriguez throwing anti-abortion students' pamphlets off the table
“This is f–king propaganda,” the Hunter College adjunct teacher hissed to students at an information table.Twitter / @StudentsforLife
Shellyne Rodriguez
Rodriguez, an art professor, was filmed cursing out pro-life students on May 2.Twitter / @StudentsforLife

“There’s no surprise,” said a former target of Rodriguez’s and Husain’s protests who did not want to be identified Wednesday. “This type of protest will lead to violence. What amazes me is that the administrations of universities are so woke that they won’t stand up to this kind of behavior.”


Decolonize This Place merged with other disaffected groups including movements to defund the police after national outrage over the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota in 2020.


Her co-founder Husain, an adjunct faculty member at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, has spoken publicly about attacking Israeli soldiers as a teenager during the first Palestinian intifada, a four-year-long uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip which began in 1987.

Shellyne Rodriguez
The unhinged professor chased The Post’s reporter and photographer into the street with her machete.Robert Miller
“I was throwing rocks, Molotov cocktails, the like,” he said at a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square in July 2016 captured on a YouTube video.


In addition to Decolonize This Place, Rodriguez is active with Take Back the Bronx, which describes itself as “a radical grass roots collective organizing for community control of the hood since 2011.”


The Post has reached out to Rodriguez for comment.
 

Only thing shocking about machete attack was a college actually firing a woke professor​



By
Jonathan Turley


May 24, 2023 12:30pm
Updated






Professor Shellyne Rodríguez is out of a job.
Hunter College fired the art professor after she held a machete to the neck of a New York Post reporter and threatened to “chop you up.”
The most remarkable aspect of the story may not be a professor brandishing a knife, but a college actually finding a basis to fire an activist academic.
Hunter College, after all, had refused to fire Rodríguez after she trashed a pro-life table run by students.
She is not the first academic to attack a pro-life display or even assault others.
Indeed, prior professors were celebrated at their schools for taking such actions against pro-life or conservative displays.
A couple days earlier, Rodríguez spotted students with pro-life material at the college.
She was captured on a videotape telling the students that “you’re not educating s–t […] This is f–king propaganda. What are you going to do, like, anti-trans next? This is bulls–t. This is violent. You’re triggering my students.”
Unlike the professor, the students remained calm and respectful.
One even said “sorry” to the accusation that being pro-life was triggering for her students.
It did not help.

Shellyne Rodriguez.
 
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