“When you're a journalist covering crime, you can never fear becoming a victim. You might be paralyzed with fear if you did. Besides you covered too many murders to be killed. Death becomes you. You wear it like a tailored suit. Like a talismanic necklace of bones to ward off evil-doers. You're also good at talking your way out of jams.”

Shellyne Rodriguez speaking to a crowd on Brook Avenue and 136th Street in the Bronx where 250 anti-police brutality protesters were attacked and arrested by the NYPD a week before, June 12, 2020. Photo and video by JB Nicholas.

THE FREE LANCE NEEDS YOUR DONATIONS TO SURVIVE. DONATE HERE.

What's being a semi-retired New York City crime reporter like? 

It's hard. Especially since the City really is going to shit right in front of our eyes. All kinds of fucked-up things keep happening that make me want to jump back into the fray. For example, my Wednesday, set to the soundtrack of "Body" by Briston Maroney on 10 and repeat: "The closest that I come to free / Is when I let the world fall around me."

The latest outrage. One former journalism colleague, and friend, almost got decapitated by someone he was attempting to interview Tuesday morning. The nutcase sprang from her apartment with a black machete and put it to his neck. After that, the same nutcase, bearing the same machete, chased him and another former colleague and friend, a news photographer working with the reporter, down the street outside. 

The New York Post reported it on its frontpage Wednesday.

Turns out, I once interviewed the nutcase, and quoted her, in the wake of a notorious mass-arrest of anti-police brutality protesters in the Bronx. I called it the "Battle of Brook Avenue."

Meanwhile, in the digital land of make-believe on social media, another friend blamed the journalists instead of the nutcase—even thought she knew I was a journalist and could easily have been either one of the journalists being chased with a machete just for trying to do my job if I was still working in the City. 

Their crime, according to her mind-boggling bullshit, was working for the right-wing New York Post. That justified killing its journalists, according to her. 

It didn't seem to matter to her that when we met, I worked for the Post. 

This is what your damned Kulturekampf has come to: activists holding machetes to reporters’ throats.

That's the outline of the insanity breaking out in my former home. Here's the details, which get even crazier.

Shellyne Rodriguez was the nutcase protagonist with the machete. She calls herself an “artist" on her personal website. Before Rodriguez attempted to murder a journalist, and was captured on camera doing it, she was also a college professor at the City University of New York's Hunter College. She taught art. 

Rodriguez also calls herself an activist. Her politics appear to align with Pol Pot, the genocidal Khmer Rouge Communist dictator who murdered between 1 and 3 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979. The New York Post knocked on Rodriguez's door because she was captured on video bullying a pro-life student group  pamphleteering inside a common area of the college on May 2.

Pamphleteering has long been protected by the Constitution. No state official, whether police or a Government-funded college professor, can interfere with it, according to the Supreme Court.

“You’re not educating shit. This is fucking propaganda,” Rodriquez bullied the students, both with her voice and—worse—authority as a professor. “What are you going to do like anti-trans next?”

One of the students tried to calmly explain what they were about. Rodriguez wouldn't let him speak. She interrupted.

“This is bullshit. This is violence. You're triggering my students," the machete-wielding nutcase-to-be charged.

"Get this shit outta here," she said, using her hand to push the group's pamphlets off the table and onto the floor, video shows.

New York Post reporter Rueven Fenton didn't deserve to die just for doing his job Tuesday morning. That's when he knocked on the front door of Rodriguez's Bronx apartment to get her side of the story. After Fenton identified himself as a Post reporter, he reported, Rodriguez screamed from behind the closed door “Get the fuck away from my door, or I’m gonna chop you up with this machete!” 

Video captured what happened next. The large but athletic 45-year-old opened the door and sprung out armed with a black machete.

"Get the fuck away from my door. Get the fuck away from my door," Rodriguez commanded as she held the shiny, sharpened edge of the big blade to the reporter's neck.

When you're a journalist covering crime, you can never fear becoming a victim. You might be paralyzed with fear if you did. Besides you covered too many murders to be killed. Death becomes you. You wear it like a tailored suit. Like a talismanic necklace of bones to ward off evil-doers. You're also good at talking your way out of jams.

That seems to me why Fenton just stood still while Rodriguez put a machete to his neck. Fenton has worked for the Post for 16 years. He's been to more murders than most NYPD homicide detectives. In the 'hood or the projects. In the middle of the night. Homicides most news organizations routinely ignore—unless police or someone white or rich or really young got killed.

A split-second before Rodriguez dragged the cold steel blade across Fenton's warm flesh, she looked to her left and saw a camera pointed at her. Post photographer Robert Miller almost captured Fenton's killing. His camera may have saved Fenton's life. Seeing Miller's camera, Rodriguez lowered the blade and retreated back inside her apartment. 

Miller is one of the coolest cats I ever met, and his reaction here proves it. His pulse stays a steady beat per second even when bullets are sizzling through the air. His reaction to Rodriguez's lethal provocation? He urged his still-shocked colleague to retreat to safety while he chastised Rodriguez in a calming voice—in the same sentence.

"Let's get out of here," Miller said to Fenton. Then, addressing Rodriquez as she was closing the door, "You can't do that." 

But Rodriquez wasn't done. The journalists left her apartment building. They were standing outside on the street in front of Miller's SUV preparing to leave. She came at them again with the machete still in her hand. 

“If I see you on this block one more fucking time, you’re gonna...,” Rodriguez said, machete in her closed fist. “Get the fuck off the block! Get the fuck out of here, yo!”

Rodriguez approached Fenton. Miller raised his camera. She turned toward Miller. Video taken by cameras inside Miller's SUV captured Rodriguez chasing him around it, machete in hand. Miller ran down the street. She chased after him. Fenton followed her. She kicked him in the shins.

I recognized Miller's silver Toyata Land Cruiser in the video from the last time I rode in it. It was a night in November 2019. Just before the pandemic. The city we once loved still existed. I was still a reporter, and a man at his "maximum villainy," is how legendary newspaper reporter HL Mencken would put it. Mencken meant it in a good way. So do I. 

That night with Miller was the kind of epic, classic, crazy night out on the town drinking and dancing that makes the City sufferable despite its blood-sucking landlords, rats, random violence and summer-time stench. Than night ended with Miller driving me and my new friend to her Lower East Side apartment—in that silver Land Cruiser. The one he almost got killed next to.

I don't live in the City anymore. Now I live in the Adirondack Mountains. I can see the sunrise from my kitchen window. I have a huge backyard and a garden. A cold river packed with trout I fish whenever I want is literally at my doorstep. I have a life I’d never thought I’d have. I have a family. I’m even happy, most days.

Still, I stay tuned to news from New York. It tears me in two. The challenges are so great, but the resources to beat them are there. Its leadership that appears lacking.

Seeing my friends terrorized by Rodriquez pissed me off. I did what pissed-off people do in the Digital Age. I posted about it on social media. The unique thing about my social media is, I have friends who live all kinds of lives. My social media "friends" include real criminals I met in prison and after. They also include people who might actually know Rodriguez and her friends. It was important to let them know just how wrong what she did is. 

Most of my social media friends agreed with my condemnation of Rodriguez. One friend, though, a Latina from the Bronx I'd met in real life and have known since 2008, disagreed.

FRIEND: cops been at their throat since forever FOREVER, thats why they don't trust anyone at their doorstep. espesh anyone at their doorstep asking questions. the games done changed, and any journalist worth thier salt knows that.

I wouldn't do this otherwise, but I'm going to re-print the exchanges that followed because it really could save lives. It's important to show my journalist colleagues just exactly how, as my friend says, the "games done changed." Today it's New York Post journalists. Tomorrow it's New York Times journalists. For any journalist to be protected, all journalists have to be protected. Stand together, or be killed alone.

ME: wtf? That coulda been me. Cops been at all our throats since forever. Dudes doing his job. Asking questions. If you think that's justification for violence you're wrong. Also, Fenton wrote 'Stolen Years: Stories of the Wrongfully Incarcerated.'

FRIEND: i didnt miss that... make no difference who he is... she dont know that. and apparently, he didnt research her enough before showing up. and just like i can falsely claim I am a journalist, so can others. and have.

Other journalist friends chimed in to support me, to no avail.

X: she’s a university professor. A simple no comment/no  thank you or go fuck yourself would have been just fine. Some journalists are not cops. Get a grip. There is ZERO justification for her behaviour. ZERO. She’s not the victim.

FRIEND: id hope you'd realize, times have changed, nowhere is safe for no one.

Another social media friend also felt compelled to callout bullshit when she saw it.

XX: stupid comment. and this crazy person came out of her building and chased him down the block with a knife in her hand and that’s OK? Fucking nuts.

FRIEND: if your allyship is conditional, it aint allyship.  tell me youve never been repeatedly violently threatened at your own home doorstep without telling me....

XX: tell me she could’ve just kept her door closed if she  felt threatened. Give me a break! Stop making excuses for her 

Meanwhile, the name "Shellyne Rodriguez" kept ringing familiar in my ears. I dug into my archives looking for clues why. I interviewed her in 2020. She'd led 250 people protesting the murder of George Floyd by police in Minnesota straight into a militarized NYPD ambush. I reported on it for Gothamist. I called it the Battle of Brook Avenue.

The international human rights group Human Rights Watch called it the most aggressive police response to the wave of George Floyd-inspired protests in the United States: “Kettling" Protesters in the Bronx: Systemic Police Brutality and Its Costs in the United States. The group is ordinarily known for revealing the atrocities of Third World strongmen.  According to their damning report,

10 minutes before an 8 p.m. curfew—imposed after looting elsewhere in the city—scores of police officers surrounded and trapped the protesters—a tactic known as ‘kettling’—as they marched peacefully through Mott Haven. Just after 8 p.m., the police, unprovoked and without warning, moved in on the protesters, wielding batons, beating people from car tops, shoving them to the ground, and firing pepper spray into their faces before rounding up more than 250 people for arrest.

Rodriguez was among a small group of protesters who returned to the battleground a week later. She identified herself as an organizer with Take Back the Bronx. Take Back the Bronx started in 2011 and grew out of Occupy Wall Street, the Hunts Point Express reported in 2015. 

"It's a new motherfucking day," Rodriquez told a crowd of protesters and supporters. 

"All these young people here are not taking this shit no more. What's more, they get together with the older generation like myself and we puttin' our heads together. We runnin' you out this motherfucking town."

In the end, all this so-called "artist" created was a caricature. She turned herself into living proof an intolerant, anti-Democratic, bullying "woke menace" is real—at least in some places.

That was my Wednesday. Thinking of my former life and the disastrous path my native home and Nation seems headed down.  From Maroney's "Body": "But I got today / And the only plans I've made / Are to love like I might never get to love someone again."

THE FREE LANCE NEEDS YOUR DONATIONS TO SURVIVE. DONATE HERE.