As pro-Palestinian student protesters took over a building at Columbia University in New York City early Tuesday, one person in the crowd outside stood out — a gray-haired woman who delivered orders to young people helping to barricade a door.
“Tie it right to the lock,” she told two masked protesters holding zip ties, according to video posted on social media. The protesters did as they were told, using the ties on a metal table pressed against the door of Hamilton Hall.
“Let’s give them a little cover,” the older woman told the crowd. “Cameras back. Cameras back.”
The woman was not a Columbia University student or faculty member. She, in fact, has no known affiliation to the school at all.
She is a 63-year-old veteran activist named Lisa Fithian, whom the New York Police Department described as a “professional agitator.”
The takeover of Hamilton Hall was a significant escalation in the strategy used by students demanding that Columbia divest from corporations that could be profiting from the war in Gaza. Both New York Mayor Eric Adams and Columbia President Nemat Shafik blamed the action on outside actors with no ties to the school.
So far, Fithian is the only outsider city officials have identified as playing a part in the seizure of the building.
New York police officials believe Fithian could be one of the people responsible for training the protesters in the tactics they used to occupy Hamilton Hall, according to two senior city officials. The officials did not provide further details, and the full scope of Fithian’s involvement in the takeover was not clear.
A police spokesperson said she was not one of the roughly 50 people arrested at Columbia when police officers stormed Hamilton Hall late Tuesday.
Fithian is no stranger to high-profile protests. For roughly 50 years, she has participated in demonstrations for a dizzying array of causes at home and abroad, racking up scores of arrests. “In my years as an anti-racist organizer, I have shut down the CIA, disrupted the World Trade Organization’s first major meeting during the Battle of Seattle, and helped launch Common Ground Relief, a grassroots organization that supported communities in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina,” she wrote in her book “Shut It Down: Stories From a Fierce, Loving Resistance.”
“I have camped in a ditch with Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star mom who protested the Iraq War. I have stood my ground in Tahrir Square and set sail on the US and Women’s Boats to Gaza,” she wrote.
Fithian did not immediately respond to messages left on her phone. In an interview Tuesday, she told The 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 that. But it’s the truth.”
At a news conference Tuesday, Adams called out “external actors who attempted to hijack this private protest.” Before police released a video that appeared to show Fithian outside Hamilton Hall and identified her by name, he also referred to an “outside agitator with a history of escalating situations and trying to create chaos.”
Shafik, Columbia’s president, said in a letter to the police department Tuesday, “We believe that while the group who broke into the building includes students, it is led by individuals who are not affiliated with the university.”
Shafik did not provide a basis for that assertion.
Supporters of the student-led protest movement at Columbia have bristled at the suggestion that outsiders were directing it.
A total of 280 people were arrested late Tuesday after police moved in on the protesters at Columbia and City College of New York.
It is unclear how many were not students or faculty members. One of those taken into custody has an arrest history dating to the G8 summit in 2005, when the person was accused of assaulting a police officer in the United Kingdom, said Rebecca Weiner, the deputy police commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism.
In a video posted on her Facebook page in April, Fithian described herself as a “nonviolent direct action trainer.”
“There’s no room for violence in these missions, and in trying to build the world that we want,” Fithian says in the clip.
Over the years, her activism has drawn attention from a host of media outlets, including the Times, the New York Post and The Miami Herald.
“It looks like we’ve already gotten the CIA’s attention,” Fithian was quoted as saying in an April 1987 Miami Herald article about the march she 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 “streetwise radical who’s teaching kids who want to be badass to be smart.” The story said unions and activist groups paid her $300 a day to conduct demonstrations and “teach their members tactics for taking over the streets.”
There is no indication she was getting paid to attend the Columbia protest.
In the video released by police, Fithian glares at two students who are trying to prevent the protesters from barricading Hamilton Hall early Tuesday.
“We’re trying to document them being assholes,” she tells somebody recording video of the encounter.
