When pro-Palestinian student protesters took over a Columbia University building on Tuesday morning, one person stood out from the crowd outside — a gray-haired woman who was delivering orders to young men helping to barricade a door.
“Tie it tight to the lock,” she told two masked protesters holding zipties, according to images posted on social media. The protesters complied, using the restraints of a metal table pressed against the door of Hamilton Hall.
“Let’s give them some cover,” the older woman told the crowd. “Cameras back. Cameras back.
The woman was not a student or faculty member at Columbia University. In fact, she has no known affiliation with the school.
She is a 63-year-old veteran activist named Lisa Fithian, or what the New York Police Department described as a “professional agitator.”
The acquisition of Hamilton Hall marked a significant escalation in the strategy used by students demanding that Columbia divest itself of companies that could be profiting from the war in Gaza. Both New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Columbia University President Nemat Shafik blamed the action on external actors with no ties to the school.
So far, Fithian is the only outsider identified by city authorities as having played a role in the building’s seizure.
NYPD officials believe Fithian may be one of the people responsible for training protesters in the tactics they used to occupy Hamilton Hall, according to two senior New York City officials. Officials did not provide further details, and the full scope of Fithian’s involvement in the building’s acquisition was unclear.
An NYPD spokesperson said she was not one of about 50 people arrested at Columbia University when officers stormed Hamilton Hall on Tuesday night.
Fithian is no stranger to high-profile protests. For nearly 50 years, she participated in demonstrations for a dizzying array of causes at home and abroad, racking up dozens of arrests.
“In my years as an anti-racist organizer, I shut down the CIA, disrupted the first major World Trade Organization meeting during the Battle of Seattle, and helped launch Common Ground Relief, a grassroots organization that supported communities in New Orleans after the hurricane. Katrina,” she wrote in her book “Shut It Down: Stories From A Fierce, Loving Resistance.”
“I camped in a ditch with Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star mother who protested the Iraq War. I maintained my position in Tahrir Square and boarded the US and women’s boats for Gaza.”
Fithian did not immediately respond to messages left on his phone. In an interview on Tuesday, she told New York Times that she was “absolutely not” organizing the protests.
“It’s actually quite absurd,” she said. “I know with these videos it’s hard for some people to believe this. But it’s the truth.”
At a press conference on Tuesday, Adams called out “outside actors who attempted to hijack this private protest.” Before releasing a video which appeared to show Fithian outside Hamilton Hall and which identified her by name, he also referred to an “outside agitator with a history of escalating situations and attempting to create chaos.”
Shafik, president of Columbia University, said in a letter to the NYPD on Tuesday: “We believe that although the group that stormed the building includes students, it is led by individuals who are not affiliated with the university.”
Shafik provided no basis for this claim.
Supporters of the student-led protest movement at Columbia bristled at the suggestion that outsiders were directing it.
A total of 280 people were arrested Tuesday night after police attacked protesters at the City College of New York and Columbia University.
It’s unclear how many were not students or teachers, but one of those detained has an arrest history dating back to the 2005 G8 summit, when the person allegedly assaulted a police officer in the United Kingdom, said Rebecca Weiner, deputy commissioner of the NYPD. intelligence and counterterrorism.
In a video posted to her Facebook page in April, Fithian described herself as a “nonviolent direct action trainer.” “There is no room for violence in these missions and in trying to build the world we want,” says Fithian in the clip.
Over the years, his activism has attracted attention from numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, the New York Post and the Miami Herald.
“We seem to have already caught the attention of the CIA,” Fithian said in an April 1987 Miami Herald article about the march he led outside the agency’s headquarters to protest U.S. policy in Central America and Southern Africa.
Mother Jones profiled Fithian in 2012, describing her as a “smart radical who teaches kids who want to be tough how to be smart.” The story noted that unions and activist groups paid him $300 a day to hold demonstrations and “teach their members tactics for taking over the streets.”
There is no indication that she was being paid to participate in the protest at Columbia University.
In video released by the NYPD, Fithian is seen glowering at two students who were trying to stop protesters from barricading Hamilton Hall on Tuesday morning.
“We’re trying to document that they’re idiots,” she tells someone recording video of the encounter.
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
